Setting Goals for 2025
As the new year begins, it's the perfect time to reflect on what you want to achieve and set meaningful goals to guide your year ahead. Research shows that people who set goals and track their progress are significantly more likely to accomplish them. Goals give us direction, help us prioritise, and provide a sense of purpose.
How to Set Effective Goals
When setting goals, it's important to keep a few principles in mind. I won't go into details too much as I have a whole course and a series of articles upcoming, but here are 4 simple tips to follow:
- Be Specific: Vague goals like "get healthier" or "be more successful" are hard to achieve. Instead, aim for something clear, like "run three times a week" or "increase revenue by 10%".
- Make Them Measurable: Ensure your goals can be tracked. For example, use metrics like weight lost, books read, or income earned.
- Break Them Down: Big goals can be overwhelming. Divide them into smaller, actionable steps to make consistent progress.
- Stay Flexible: Life changes, and so will your goals. Regularly reflect and adjust them as needed.
If you want to go deeper into figuring out what you want and how to create achievable goals, I'm currently working on an interactive online course to teach my complete system. Sign up for my newsletter to get notified once it's live!
My Personal Goals
Similar to last year, I want to start this year by sharing my goals for 2025.
To me, it's important to practice what I preach and I believe that sharing your goals helps you connect with people and fosters collaboration.
I grouped them into six categories: business, finance, health, personal development, relationship and hobbies.
Business
Since I pivoted my career path recently, my main focus is on my business this year.
- Launch Course: I started building my first interactive course on figuring out what you actually want and setting reasonable goals to get there. I want to ship it by March.
- Offer 3 Coaching Programs: Besides the course, I also want to offer 3 different coaching programs for a variety of needs. Probably a 2-week, a 90-day and a group program.
- Start YouTube: To grow my audience, I also plan to start a YouTube channel. I want to do at least 6 videos this year, covering topics like managing priorities or setting goals. I still feel like an imposter and it's definitely the most intimidating one, but I'm also really excited to start this journey.
- Grow My Blog: Last but not least, I want to further grow my blog and increase my monthly visitors by another 50%. To do that, I plan to write at least 12 blog posts throughout the year.
Personal Development
Besides my business goals, I also want to continue investing time, money and effort into my personal development. As a coach and educator, my knowledge, experience and skills are my primary capital for business success.
- Read 12 Books: I read 37 books in 2024 and gathered hundreds of new insights and learnings. Yet, I want to focus on doing instead of learning, so this year I only plan to read 12 books, ideally mostly fiction and comforting books.
- Pass 2 Exams: Every semester I'd like to attend a new lecture in philosophy and pass the exam respectively. In most cases, this means sending in a paper.
- Complete 2 30-day Challenges: Lastly, after my previous challenges were so much fun, I want to do more 30-day challenges. I will probably do Tai Chi and try to buy nothing for a full month.
Finance
Since I quit my engineering business, my primary goal is to get back to my previous revenue level. I don't expect to fully get there by 2025, but I'm still aiming high anyways.
- Sustainable Revenue: First and foremost, I want to earn enough money so that we can pay all our expenses and cover the loan for our house.
- Cut Expenses: Last year, my wife and I managed to save almost 5.000 € by simply not spending so much money. Now we want to cut back even further by saving another 3.600 € in total.
Health
Since quitting alcohol and cigarettes, my health steadily improved over the year. I followed my established workout and meditation routines and managed to loose another 6 kilograms. Apart from keeping my habits, I want to further improve some aspects.
- Lose 2 Kilograms: Two more kilos and I'm finally back to at my ideal weight.
- Heal Chronic Gastritis: I had mixed results trying to heal my SIBO, but I managed to adjust my diet and reduce my stress levels to experience less issues overall. The last pain point is my chronic gastritis which frequently flares up and causes terrible pain.
- Increase VO2Max: Landing at 50 last year, I want to further increase my VO2Max up to 52 with a mix of running, interval training and body weight exercises.
Relationship
It took me until 2023 to finally realise that relationships only thrive with continuous effort. This is true for both romantic and casual relationships, but this year I focus most of my goals on my marriage.
- Have 12 ABC-Dates: My sister first inspired the idea of ABC dates. The idea is pretty simple. Traverse the alphabet and have a date for each letter. We decided to have one each month and alternate the planning. January will start with a murder-mystery night!
- Go To 5 Concerts: As a musician, going to concerts was always high up on my agenda. There's no better way to experience music than life performances. I want to go to 5 concerts in total with a mix of indie, rock, jazz and classical music.
- Build Our House: We are finally building our house! We plan to do quite some work ourselves and thus will spend a lot of time at the construction site.
Hobbies
Last but not least, I dedicate a full category to writing. Besides technical writing and blogging, I'm an aspiring fantasy novelist working on a new young adult trilogy.
- Finish Book #1: While making a lot of progress last year, I'm still not at the finish line when it comes to writing my debut novel. I do have a lot of experience now and am confident that I will be able to finish the first draft.
- Record 2 Songs: It's been a while since I recorded some music. My wife and I love singing duets and we want to record at least 2 songs this year.
Conclusion
Compared to 2024, I have less goals overall. While some are rather passive and already part of my routines, others are quite huge and time-consuming e.g. building a house or starting my YouTube journey.
Once again, I do not plan to achieve all of them and I know that my goals will most likely change slightly as the year progresses.
How about you? Do you set goals? If so, what are your goals for 2025?