Questions I ask to achieve my goal in 2025

Welcome to 2025! The internet is flooded with people reflecting on their year and enthusiastically setting goals.

Sadly, we know in three weeks time the enthusiasm will have leaked out like a deflating balloon.

And it is sad because goals are such a powerful tool for change in our lives.

Setting clear goals and diligently working towards them is massively transformational.

Goals have led me to:

• Healing my adrenal fatigue (the goal was the feel more energised)

• Landing the most expansive job where I feel so accepted and value (the goal was to get promoted at my old company but the Universe had better ideas)

• Contribute to an investment account every single month in 2024 (the goal was to secure my financial future)

Sometimes the outcome is exactly what we're aiming for and sometimes we get something different, usually better.

Either way, our lives have changed.

The conundrum is we love goals and we suck at them.

Here are four questions to ask yourself to make sure you achieve your 2025 goals.

Am I excited by my goal?

Conventional knowledge will tell you that your goals need to be SMART.

What I find with SMART goals is we get so caught up in making sure we're ticking off the boxes that we suck the life out of our goals.

They become boring, flat, uninspiring.

We write goals like “Run 5km in under 35 minutes by 31 March 2025.”

Tell me, does that sound exciting to you? Are you motivated by those words?

I'm not.

The most important thing you can do when setting your goal is infuse it with energy.

Make sure you feel something when you read it.

Give your words with potency to inspire you to keep going.

Those goals sound like:

“Create my happy home buying plan.”

“Be intuitively guided and in flow with my work.”

“Find my crew.”

Use words that have resonance with you like crew instead of friends.

When you write goals like this, every time you read the goal, think about the goal, you connect with the vision of where you are going and who you are becoming.

That motivates you to keep going.

What resources do I already have available to me?

One of the first tricks our brains play on us when we set a goal is “I can't because I don't have x.”

It is a very clever trick designed to keep us in the safe zone of what is familiar.

We get blocked by thinking we don’t have enough to get started.

Then we either don't start on our goal or we go and spend a bunch of money on courses and equipment that is absolutely necessary to achieve the goal.

Only we don't actually know what we need yet.

A better approach, and way to break the shackles, is to ask yourself what resources do you already have?

What books have you already got? What courses have you already signed up for? What can you Google? Who do you know that can share knowledge or equipment?

Sometimes your best action step towards a goal sounds like “read 10 blog posts for beginners and make notes on the best way to start.”

This is helpful for three reasons:

1. You see how well resourced you already are which shuts your brain up, letting you get on with your goal.

2. You don't get overwhelmed by a bunch of information or stuff you don't know what to do with, avoiding another clever trick your brain can play to stay in the safe zone.

3. You don't start investing money in your goal until you're further into it. Meaning you know that you're committed (sometimes we set goals only to need to pivot) and you have a much clearer idea what you actually need so less likely to waste money.

Always start with what you already have and build from there.

What habits will lead my to my goal?

When I work with my coaching clients on their goals, the action steps fall into two categories:

1. Discrete steps like journalling on why the goal is important to them or doing research or reaching out to someone.

2. Repeated steps like taking a pause each day or training sessions or checking bank accounts.

What I find is they do more discrete steps at the start as they are exploring the goal and more repeated steps as things progress.

Essentially we start to figure out the path for them to achieve the goal. It becomes about tweaking and refining those actions rather than doing anything different or one off.

Repeated steps are habits.

Habits are the process to achieving your goal.

What are you doing each day or each week to move towards your goal?

At some point on your goal journey, you will identify two or three key actions to be doing regularly.

Building strong habits around those, really locking them in and your goal takes care of itself.

What’s your check in process?

A big reason we fail to achieve our goals is we forget about them.

We lose focus, stop taking action and all the momentum peters out. Back to our deflated balloon.

You don’t want to set a goal now and forget about it until November.

You'll look at it and think there's no way I can achieve that in six weeks so do nothing about it. And you finish the year in the same place you started. Talk about disheartening.

Part of the reason working with a coach is so successful is because you are forced every fortnight to look at your goals and talk about your progress. It keeps the goals on your radar.

What you need instead is a check in process.

Maybe each week when you plan your week, you review your goals and decide what you're going to do next.

Maybe you set a lofty, more visionary goal for the year and translate that into something more concrete for the quarter. Then at the end of March you look at where you're at and decide where you want to be at the end of June.

Maybe every Full Moon you go on a self date to reflect on how you're progressing.

Maybe you set a daily reminder on your phone so your goals pop up and you connect with them every day. (This is why your goal needs to EXCITE you. Imagine reading something everyday that feels like a chore. You're not achieving that goal and feeling good about it.)

The more often you check in with your goal, the faster you will achieve it.

However you decide to do it, the most important part is to be consistent. Keep coming back to your goal, why it matters to you and ask yourself what is the next step. Sooner or later, you're going to smash your goal.

Now I'm set, and you're set, to achieve my goal for 2025.

You're not there yet but using these questions you are well on your way to goal achievement.

Each question deals with common places we get tripped up by our goals.

They don't excite us.

We don't think we have what we need.

We keep looking for new steps to take instead of focusing on repeating the ones that work.

We forget about our goals.

All of these potential hurdles are now solved!

You are in the strongest position you've ever been to achieve your 2025 goals.

If you're still feeling wobbly on your goals and want my help getting rock solid, download my goal achievement workbook Energise Your Goals.