Sometimes the best laid plans get derailed, which is exactly what happened to me last week. I had a epiphany that completely changed the outcome of the Ultimate Personal Success Plan. It took me a week to figure out exactly what I was going to do, but the result of this blast of revelation makes the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan so much more powerful. So for a week posts were not published and I have been pretty silent as I developed this plan, more on this later…

So let’s get back on track now you should have a bunch of notes and thoughts from the previous three posts.

1. You should have all your focus areas defined and narrowed down to 5 to 7 important areas. My focus areas for the coming year are:  Family, Spirituality, Health, Professional Growth, Writing, & Renewal.
2. You should have a document of your hopes and dreams and thoughts for high-level goals for 2013.

We are going to use that information to narrow down and define the path for the next year. There are three things that we will focus on next. They are the Annual Goals, the Focus Area Goals, and the Annual Vision. Let me explain these.

The Annual Goals

Last year I did not have top annual goals, I only had the vision and the focus area goals. The fallacy I found is that the vision did not really define an absolute and definite ending in mind. It had an end in mind but it was somewhat subjective. My focus area goals were measurable and very well defined, yet the vision left room for argument. I still think the vision is very important, we’ll talk about that in a moment. This year I have added annual goals to the line-up. In order to keep myself focused I chose to not have more than 3 annual goals. These will not be easy goals, but I wanted to focus so precisely that it would make me keep those goals front and center. After the last post you might consider this a bit contradictory with what I said about the focus areas, but in reality the focus areas should help in defining your annual goals.

These three goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. In other words they should be a S.M.A.R.T goals. My annual goals for this year are personal, but they go into three areas of my life: family, financial and professional. They reinforce my focus areas and will help to bring greater purpose to them.

So your homework is to define 1 to 3 top annual goals for the next year.

The Focus Area Goals

Last year I had 8 focus areas and between 2 and 5 goals per focus area and it was just way too much. I felt very unbalanced and overwhelmed.  Sure I got a lot done, but the sacrifices were too much. So this year I simplified it even more. I limited myself to only 5 focus areas, I suggest you do the same. This was not easy to do, because it meant sacrificing something for the success of something else. Not only did I narrow the number of focus areas, but I also limited the number of goals per focus areas to a maximum of 3 per area. In some cases this was even harder. These goals should be definite and measurable, so you know when they have been achieved.

***Warning!  I want to make you aware of one thing that I find difficult and many people I have worked with also find difficult. When writing your annual goals and focus area goals, be very careful about goals that span the entire year. For example instead of saying “I will exercise 5 days a week for 20 minutes,” perhaps think about changing the goal to: “I will exercise for 100 minutes a week.” I am all about setting up positive habits, but life comes in ups and downs and I have seen too many people give-up on their goals, when they have a little failure on these habit type of goals.

So your homework will be to define the 1 to 3 focus area goals for each of your focus areas. 

The Annual Vision

The annual vision should be written in past tense as if it already had occurred. The annual vision is not so much a goal, as it is a place where you will end up at the end of the year. It might describe the person you became, the accomplishments you achieved, or even the way you feel after the successful year you have experienced. It encompasses, at least in part, your focus areas and your annual goals, but it is not a repeat of them. Like the other thing I have laid out, this also needs to be focused. I suggest keeping it to 3 sentences or shorter.

For example, my vision for 2013 is as follows, “This was the most successful year I have ever had. I grew closer to my family, and became a better husband and father. I  achieved the most financial success I have ever had in my life and established myself as THE execution expert for organizations. My health and spirituality have increased exponentially, making me a better person both inside and out.”

If you look at these three areas you can see that they are creating alignment from top to bottom. That is a critical aspect of this plan and will help to make your goal achievement more powerful and focused.

For your homework, develop your own 2013 personal vision.

Summary & Things to Come

These three things will take a bit of a different role this year, but you have to have these three things established before you can move onto the other areas. I am really excited to share with you the epiphany I had this last week. It includes a whole new mechanism to track and accomplish your goals. I actually had to hire a programmer to make this functionality. I showed this to someone that is highly successful and has succeeded a lot in their life and their response was, “WOW, when can I get it!“

On June 1^st of 2012, I released a guest post on a personal branding site that went viral. I couldn’t believe how much it was shared on Twitter and other social networks in such a short amount of time. I was invited to start-off the first day this Personal Branding Blogathon, put on by Peter Sterlacci at http://www.PeterSterlacci.com. I think the reason the post went viral is because it touched upon the desire that we all have in life – TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.  As we begin this journey of creating the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan, I want to share a portion of this post with you, because I think it will help you in determining how high you really want to go with your own goals. If you don’t know how high, it is hard to create a plan to get there.

The full text of this article is located here: http://petersterlacci.com/2012/06/01/screw-dents-im-aiming-immense-gaping-hole/

“I have many regrets about the life I’ve lived—coupled with equal failures to accompany those regrets. But the biggest failure—and the regret that leads them all—was the failure to grasp my full potential earlier in life.

“ I’ve always worked hard, but I haven’t always worked smart. I’ve sought success, but I didn’t always plan for that success. Since I failed to grasp all that I could become; I never defined what success looked like, nor focused my actions toward it.

“A handful of years ago I experienced a “renewal.” After selling a company I had founded, I began to realize that I needed something more. I desired more: wisdom, success, and meaning—in every area of my life. I consumed knowledge, and I worked even harder. I wrote my first book, started a very successful leadership blog, and extended myself into every opportunity that pushed me higher.

Success came slowly, but it wasn’t enough. Soon, I realized I needed to focus my energy. I could not find any guidance to help me do this in a way that was right for me, so I created The Ultimate Personal Success Plan. For two years, I have used that, updated it, and tweaked it to fit my aspirations.

“Then recently, I saw the title of an article that had something to do with making a dent in the world. I didn’t read the article, or see who the author was. But the concept stayed with me; the thought kept piercing my mind: “What kind of dent am I making?” I was struggling with the way my life was going. The success I was having was good, but it wasn’t enough—or maybe it just wasn’t …meaningful.

“As I pondered this one night, thinking about how a dent is the result of an impact (a hammer striking a wall, a heavy object dropping to the ground), and how the size of the impact determines the dimension and depth of the dent, the thought struck me:

 “Screw ‘Dents’…I want to make an ‘Immense Gaping Hole.’”

“What’s the gaping hole that I want to create in the world? I am still working on that, but I want to make a difference in people’s lives, do something useful, create something meaningful …be somebody who makes other people’s lives better, and of course improve the quality of my life and that of my family.

“So I find myself again redefining my Ultimate Personal Success Plan, almost halfway through the year. In doing this, I recognized that my aspirations needed greater impact. I couldn’t settle for slow, small impacts.

 “Now is the time to start ripping open a cavernous, gaping hole! Because simply making “a dent,”…just isn’t adequate.”

I share that message because I want you to do some hard thinking about what you want out of your life, and more importantly, what you want out of the next year of your life. This is a tough question that took me months to figure out. But exploring the path of determining who you are, and where you are going is amazingly fulfilling, and clarifying.

Pondering this question, can be both enlightening, yet at the same time stressful. The idea of what we want out of life (or the next year) or what we are capable of, are often limited by our own thinking. So as you explore this question for the next few days, it is important to bring others into your thought process.

I am not suggesting that you do not have a grand enough dream, but often what we want is highly influenced by what other people close to us want, and often other people have a greater vision and hope for us than we will ever have for ourselves.

When I created the last version of the Ultimate Success Plan, I knew that it would be a crummy plan if at the end of the year my wife was unhappy. I had to review my plan with her and make some adjustments. My vision of being a good husband is severely limited in my mind, but the vision (or hope 🙂 ) that my wife has for me – is greatly expanded.

You may have portions of your plan that have to do with lifestyle, health, career, spirituality and a bunch of other things. Balancing all this can be overwhelming if you do not take the time to talk with important stakeholders or “experts” about your goals in that area. Perhaps you need to speak with an “expert” for a health portion of your plan, which could be a personal trainer or nutritionist. For a professional growth area, it might be a coach or mentor.  For a financial success area it might be a financial planner. A stakeholder in a relationship area might be the person you want to develop the relationship with, like your spouse, or a friend.

When setting your goals, set your sights high. I hope you realize what you are capable of, because all of us, including you – are always capable of more, and better. Set that vision high, and make sure to work with stakeholders and experts, because they may have a vision of you that is even higher than your own!

So your homework for the next few days is to to write down all your hopes and dreams for 2013. Aim high, but make them realistic. When you think you have them figured out, talk with key stakeholders to verify that you are not short-changing yourself. The elements of what you create will come together as we move farther along with the creation of your success plan.

Please leave comments or questions below if you need help. If you are willing, please share some of your dreams and aspirations as well. Don’t forget to subscribe to get notices of all the posts as soon as they are released.

Success Plan, Personal Success Plan, Annual Plan, Resolutions, Goals… nope, lets combine it all into The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan, now is the time! As many of my readers have seen I have been working on an e-book for the Ultimate Personal Success Plan. As I have been working on it there has been one thing that kept bugging me. – I hate e-books… Usually when someone gives away an e-book, I download it, I browse through it, and then it goes in a folder where e-books go to rest and ultimately sit unopened forever more.

So I decided to do something different than what I had set out to do. I decided that I would release the Ultimate Personal Success Plan content as a series of self-study blog posts. Delivering the content this way will allow you to take the content in bites and be able to digest it, ask questions, and have time to really put the time and effort into developing each part for yourself. I will still give away the completed e-book at the end of the blog post series. The completed e-book will be greatly enhanced by participation and questions that come up during the course of these posts. This will allow me to add this content to the e-book for those wanting the compiled version of all these posts.

Why The Personal Success Plan

For the last 3 years I have been obsessed with finding a format or a model that would help to organize, track and guarantee the success of my annual goals. I have a grand vision of success for my life, and I knew that if I did not consistently execute on my annual goals, that I would never reach the success I was dreaming of. This search was much harder than I had anticipated. I read books, purchased material on life-plans, kept up with blogs of experts, researched annual resolutions, and much, much more. In the end, nothing satisfied me, so I decided to create my own plan.

The plan started in 2011 on my blog as the “Personal Success Plan.” During that year I learned a lot about what worked and didn’t work in the plan I created. While I had a lot of success that year, the next year brought more changes. In 2012 I updated the model I was working on and created the “Ultimate Personal Success Plan.” Again this year I learned a lot more about how to achieve goals and create better success in my own life. These include a deeper understanding of various parts of the model as well as more background information to make sure that I executed on the plan. I also learned a lot more about managing the constant balancing act between my personal goals, family goals, and professional goals.

What is the Personal Success Plan

When I set out to create the ultimate personal success plan, there was one overriding principle that I really tried to maintain throughout the plan. That principle was, SIMPLICITY. If a plan is tough to manage, administer, or track, it’s doomed to failure. No one, not the least of those is me, wants to fail because we could not keep up with the work of maintaining and tracking a plan.

So the concept of a one-page annual success plan spurred into my mind. This one-page document would not be for tracking, but for defining what one wants to achieve. I felt that if I could not fit my annual goals onto a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper, than I was probably making too many goals. I further knew that this one-page, had to hold ALL of the information about my goals, the reason I was doing them, the high-level steps, my purpose, my destination, and everything else to clearly define what the year really was going to be about.

As I explore the plan, I will go deep into the components of the plan to make sure you have a comprehensive understanding. In all honesty, I did not have a good understanding of some components until recently, because in the middle of this year I basically scrapped my plan and changed course because of some personal changes I was making in my life. This caused me to do a lot of reflection and adjustment on various parts of the plan.

In this series of blog posts (Probably 12 Parts) and ultimately the e-book, I will lay out the changes for the NEW Annual One-Page Success Plan. It has various modifications this year that may seem to be only aesthetic, but are extremely powerful to one’s success. I’ll go very deep into each section, and into the tools and systems that you can use to monitor your success throughout the year. I’ll be providing worksheets that you can download for different parts, to build the elements of what will become YOUR personal success plan.

Furthermore, I will be providing many new constructive ideas for organizing your plan, figuring out what should be in it, and a lot more on how to actually execute and achieve your goals. So stay tuned and get ready to start working the next month on creating your 2013 Personal Success Plan.

Let’s Get Started on YOUR Personal Success Plan!

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Please share your thoughts and hopes below. What do you want to make sure I touch upon? What have you specifically struggled with in achieving your goals?