Zainab Aderounmu 
The New Year has begun and making a sense of what you want may feel overwhelming. You may be tempted to ‘see how it goes’ instead of setting concrete goals, but I don’t recommend because what you don’t measure, you can’t multiply. On that note, here’s a step-by-step process of setting your goals for the new year.
- Start from a place of gratitude: Have you heard the saying, count your blessings and name them one by one? That’s exactly what you want to do here. Reflect on the previous year you had, and deliberately fish out the great moments, the little moments that held you together, and people who made it worthwhile. You don’t have to tell them ( it’ll be nice if you did), but write all of it down. At the end of the list, the goal is to have more than 10 things you’re grateful for. This helps you frame your mind positively for the year ahead.
- Review : Do an in-depth review of what worked, what didn’t work, and why it didn’t work. What you don’t measure, you can’t manage, not to talk of multiplying. Write out 6 categories of your life, including finance, business, relationships, etc., and rate each over 10. The score on each category would tell you how you performed per category.
- Cast a vision: This is where you want to close your eyes and imagine what you consider success. At the end of 2026, what would happen for you to consider the year a great one? Leave out inhibitions; you stayed on track and everything worked out for good for you. You got all the opportunities you pursued, and all the doors you knocked on opened. What did your year look like? Write that down. Afterwards, group this raw data into categories of your life and write out three SMART goals per bucket; you should have 6 buckets to make it easy. For example: Family: (i) Eat dinner with my family once every week. (ii) Go on a local family adventure at the end of each quarter. (iii) Go on a family trip in December 2026.
- Break it up: Here, you should break your goals up into monthly plans or at least decide what you need to do to achieve each goal. It’s not enough to set big goals, you also have to decide the specific actions necessary to achieving these goals, so that you can build a system around them. For example, to achieve a weekly family dinner, you need to decide what day works best and probably log that day and time into everyone’s calendar, amongst other things.
- Seek Accountability: This is totally optional. However, if you need someone who’s probably on the same journey to offer support, don’t be afraid to seek them out. For instance, I wrote my first book because I had mentioned the intention to a friend, and he wouldn’t stop asking me for the first chapter, so I wrote the first chapter and the second one and the final one.
I wish you an amazing and fulfilling Year! Don’t be afraid to write back to me if you use this system: wuraolaaderounmu@gmail.com
Zainab ADEROUNMU A. W. is a First Class graduate of English Language and the Overall Best Graduating Student from the Lagos State University, Lagos Nigeria. She’s a professional Master of Ceremonies, known as The Hijabi Compere , a public speaking coach and Communications Professional. She is currently a Youth advisor to the European Union where she doubles as the Spokesperson and Head of Communications & PR for the Youth Sounding Board.