What are your Objectives?

Life Goals Exercise

This exercise allows you to define your life goals and split them into shorter-term objectives with action plans.

Following this process forces self-reflection. Documenting the outcomes helps clarify your purpose and direction, like a personal anchor you can reference whenever you make major decisions. You can use the action plans to hold yourself accountable on progress to become the person you want to be.

Doing this exercise once is extremely powerful. Repeating and refining it on a periodic basis enables you to make updates as your life changes.

Objectives of the Life Goals Exercise

·       To define your Life Goals

·       To highlight the power of SMART Objectives

·       To learn how to create action plans

Step 1: Define Your Life Goals

Task 1: Values

Start by writing down your personal Values.

Values are principles or standards you consider important and guide your behaviour and decision-making. They are deeply held beliefs that influence how you perceive the world, interact with others, and prioritise actions. They shape your identity and are a source of motivation and purpose in life.

Examples include: Integrity; Compassion; Community Service; and Respect.

Task 2: Passions and Interests

Next, write down your Passions and Interests. Be clear about what are your genuine Passions and what are merely Interests.

The difference between a Passion and an Interest lies in the intensity of feeling and depth of engagement. Passions have a high emotional intensity and provide personal fulfilment. The commitment to a Passion involves significant time and effort, often influencing life choices and identity.

An Interest indicates a more casual enjoyment or curiosity of an activity or subject. While they are enjoyable, they are less likely to be considerations when making life choices and more likely to change over time.

Examples include: Playing football; Volunteering for environmental activities; or Activities in a religious community.

Task 3: Define Your Life Goals

Imagine yourself as an 80-year-old telling someone your life story.  What would you like to tell them?

Use your Values and Passions from Tasks 1 and 2 to help define your Life Goals. You may need deeper self-reflection if your Life Goals don't align with your Values and your Passions.

Topics to consider

·       Financial

·       Health

·       Family and Social

·       Community

·       Career

·       Experiences/Adventure

·       Location – Where do you want to live?  How much do you want to travel?

Defining your Life Goals using SMART criteria makes them clearer and more actionable.

Go to the level of detail that feels right for you. Too little detail is hard to action; too much may be overwhelming. More than twelve Life Goals may be going into more detail than is manageable. If you have more than this, review them for importance and prioritisation, or see if some can be combined.

There are no right or wrong answers.  Everyone is different.

Examples of SMART Financial Life Goals include:

·       Owning your house without a mortgage by the age of 60

·       Paying for your children to go to university

·       Being able to give your children $100k each for a deposit to buy a house

·       Having a retirement income of $100k per year from the age of 65

Step 2: Split Your Life Goals into Shorter-Term Objectives

Let's make the assumption that we want to achieve all our Life Goals by the age of 80.

Task 1: Choose Age Milestones

Choose different age milestones to set short-term objectives. Make the first two or three milestones at 5-year intervals. After that choose longer intervals. Ideally, having 6 or 7 age milestones from today until you are 80.

For example, if you're 17 now, maybe choose 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 65 and 80.

Task 2: Split each Life Goal into Objectives at each Age Milestone

Take each individual Life Goal and split it into milestone objectives at each chosen age range.

Remember SMART objectives facilitate action planning, which is especially important for the nearest Age Milestone.

For example, if your Life Goal is to own your house without a mortgage then you could break it down as follows:

·       20: Nothing

·       25: Start saving for deposit, to be at least $60k by the age of 30

·       30: Buy first apartment with mortgage

·       40: Sell apartment and buy first house

·       50: Sell first house and buy bigger house

·       65: Mortgage fully paid off

Step 3: Create an Action Plan

Focus your Action Plan on the objectives for your first Age Milestone.

Task 1: Create Sub-Objectives where necessary

It may be necessary to split a 5-year objective into sub-objectives to make it easier to identify relevant actions.

Continue using the SMART methodology for sub-objectives.

For example, the objective of saving $60k between the ages of 25 and 30 could be split into annual sub-objectives, such as:

·       25: Total savings of $6.5k by end of year

·       26: Total savings of $16k by end of year

·       27: Total savings of $29k by end of year

·       28: Total savings of $44k by end of year

·       29: Total savings of $60k by end of year

Task 2: Identify Opportunities, Obstacles and Resources

Identify potential opportunities, obstacles and resources (required or available) for each Objective and Sub-Objective.

This enables more effective action planning, either by highlighting actions required or areas where further research is possible to clarify relevant actions.

For example, the objective of saving $60k between the ages of 25 and 30 could have the following:

·       Opportunities: Annual bonus may provide additional saving opportunity; Getting higher investment returns than expected

·       Obstacles: Don't know how to set up an investment account or which funds to invest in; Don't know how much money can realistically be saved each month; Don't know what investment returns to expect

·       Resources: Family friend who is a Financial Adviser

Task 3: Document Actions for each Sub-Objective

Create actions for each sub-objective. The SMARTer the sub-objectives, the easier it is to identify relevant actions.

Seek help and advice to leverage other people's knowledge and experience to create effective action plans. Consider the opportunities, obstacles and resources for the sub-objectives when writing actions.

For example, the actions for saving $60k between the ages of 25 and 30 could be:

·       25: Open an investment account; Set up a direct debit of $500 per month to buy a low fee index tracker stock fund; Review investment balance at year end to confirm next year's direct debit

·       26: Increase monthly direct debit to $700; Review investment balance at year end to confirm next year's direct debit

·       27: Increase monthly direct debit to $900; Review investment balance at year end to confirm next year's direct debit

·       28: Increase monthly direct debit to $1,000; Review investment balance at year end to confirm next year's direct debit

·       29: Increase monthly direct debit to $1.100; Review investment balance at year end to confirm next year's direct debit

Outcome

Doing this exercise is likely to have taken considerable time, requiring self-reflection whilst writing, reviewing and editing your answers.

Life Goals

The Life Goals should resonate with you and provide a clear direction and sense of purpose.

Age Milestone Objectives should enable you to see an achievable path to achieve your Life Goals that may have otherwise seemed unreachable. This process may have allowed you to become more ambitious, or conversely, more realistic.

The short-term action plan should make ambitious objectives appear achievable. The process may have made you think more widely than you had before, identifying new opportunities and options, or realising what action need to be taken in the short-term to achieve long-term goals.

SMART Objectives

Hopefully, you will have seen that focusing on making your objectives SMART makes it easier to plan actions to achieve them and to hold yourself accountable.

This is a lesson that can be applied to everything in your life.

Action Planning

You will have seen how action planning becomes much easier when objectives are SMART and when large, long-term objectives are broken down into smaller, short-term objectives.

In this exercise we only created action plans for the first set of Age Milestone Objectives. The timeline in your life is long, and because things change any detailed long-term action plans are likely to be irrelevant by the time you get there.

What Next?

Use the results of this exercise as a reference document that you check on a periodic basis:

·       Monthly: To hold yourself accountable for taking the actions

·       3-6 Months: To track progress towards achieving objectives and re-assessing actions if necessary

·       Annually: To review progress and re-confirm objectives and actions for the next year

·       Ad hoc: Whenever you have big changes or decisions in your life, to help align yourself with your purpose and life goals

·       3-5 Years: To do a full review and adjust life goals, sub-objectives and actions to ensure it remains relevant throughout your life

Adjusting actions and sub-objectives may need to be done fairly regularly to ensure you're on track to achieve your Life Goals. Over time you may realise that your Life Goals change as well and need to be updated, although this should be much less frequent.

Following up on questions raised and help required

There may be areas where you still have questions or need help working out what actions are required. This is where LAUNCHPAD BOOSTER is here to support you.

Review the Common Questions and the Tools, Resources and Mindsets for information and skills that you need.

Join the LAUNCHPAD BOOSTER community for regular group coaching sessions and interactions.