Leadership Minute: How To Set and Hit Your 2025 Goals

To kick off the year, I'm sharing my favorite tips for planning the year ahead

It’s a new year, and the scoreboard in our personal and professional life is resetting to zero. Starting well is essential in all facets of life, and the decisions we make at the beginning of the year often have an outsized impact on affect our outcomes over the rest of the year.

In December, I gave a talk to the Friday Forward Foundation Members sharing my favorite best practices for annual planning. This takes the strategic planning approach leaders do every year at their organizations and applies it to a personal context. The recording of that talk is available at the bottom of this post, and I also wanted to highlight a few of my favorite tips, resources and best practices that I’ve discovered and shared over the years.

• Set A Few Goals & Leverage The Domino Effect With goals, less is more. The past few years, I have developed a one-page plan of three or four high level goals for the year that are most important. Under each goal on the page, I list many different tactics that, if executed properly, should help me reach the goal, leveraging the domino effect. I review those goals and that one page each morning.

• Visualize Your Goals: As I discuss in the talk linked below, my family always makes vision boards at the beginning of each year. A vision board documents your goals for the year and keep those objectives front of mind. I hang my vision board in my office every year to keep my most important priorities front of mind.

• Get In Alignment: It’s crucial to ensure your daily actions are aligned to your big goals. I’ve created two tools that have been downloaded by over 1,000 people that help get people aligned to goals: the Whole Life Dashboard and the Goal Ladder. You can use either tool each morning as part of a morning routine to focus your energy correctly.

• Make a Relationship Dashboard: When 2025 comes to a close, which personal or professional relationships will you want to have deepened? What new bonds will you want to have forged? Create a Relationship Dashboard, which I introduced in a Leadership Minute, to ensure you’re proactively building meaningful relationships.