Annual Review & Goal Setting Templates

Each year I put together an annual review and goal setting process to help draw perspective from the prior year and frame how I want to focus my time and effort in the new year.

For me, this year is about finishing the reader manuscript for my novel, growing my coaching business, building and strengthening community in North Carolina, and continuing to chisel away at my exceptional physique.

I'm also putting a premium on learning how to move toward (rather than away from) my resistance. There's always a voice in our heads telling us to curb our ambitions or take fewer risks. What I've learned through my own pursuits (and failures) as well as through coaching others is that our resistance is often a useful signal amidst the noise. A beacon that tells us where to go next. And because it's agnostic to goal or domain, confronting it can be one of our biggest levers for meaningful change.

Below are the templates I used this year in case they're helpful to anyone else still working on 2025 goals.

As always, would love to hear what you're working on this upcoming year. Shoot me an email, or if you want an accountability buddy to talk through any of it with, feel free to schedule time to chat.

​Annual Review​

​Goal Setting​

PS - If I mess up any formatting or the links don't work for you, just send me an email and I'll make sure to get you a copy.

Links

​The Most Important Question of Your Life (Mark Manson): I like this framing for thinking about goals. Sometimes it's easy to think about what you want in 2025, but Manson says we will be more effective if we ask what pain or struggle we're willing to go through for the things we want. The destination needs to be worth the sacrifice.

​Why Do Some People Succeed after Failing, While Others Continue to Flounder? (Nature): In an interesting study, researchers tried to determine why some people succeeded after failure while others were doomed to fail again despite trying even harder. The study found that there exists a razor thin threshold between those two sides of the coin, even when the types of people and levels of effort were very similar. The difference was how they learned from failure. Those who eventually found success did so for two reasons: 1) they incorporated more of their failure into their subsequent attempts, thus building on what they already tried rather than discarding it; and, 2) they put a premium on receiving feedback from others about those failures and then utilized that feedback in their subsequent attempts.

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Next Sunday

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