Home Pastors Pastor Blogs Writing a Life Plan for the New Year, Part 5

Writing a Life Plan for the New Year, Part 5

It’s day 5 of our life planning series. This week we’ve attempted to take it step-by-step, in a simple format, to write a plan that will help us achieve some specific goals for the new year. If you missed any of these posts, be sure to catch up by reading:

Today we have our final step…and it’s a good one…in fact…it’s my favorite….

Possibly yours too!

The last step in our life plan is to….CELEBRATE THE WIN!

In fact, you must! It’s critical to any long-term success.

Build a reward in for the completion of each of your goals… The size of the reward can be based on the size of the goal and the size of your budget, but it should be enticing enough to keep you motivated.

It’s been said that what gets rewarded gets repeated…and that seems to be true from my experience.

Find a way to celebrate achieving your goals this year.

Using our hypothetical goals, here’s an example of what this might look like:

Lose 10 pounds – Buy a new outfit…or two…

Improve my marriage communication – Plan a special vacation together or eat at your favorite restaurant…

Pay off my credit card – Buy a new couch…but pay cash for it…

Read through the Bible – Give a Bible to someone who needs one.

Write a book – Get a weekend away to do nothing….absolutely nothing.

These are just hypothetical. You can come up with something better for you for celebration. It is important that you reward yourself though. Obviously you may need to get help accomplishing some of these rewards, but that’s part of the beauty of Step 4. As others are included in your progress they will be enticed to help celebrate your win.

That’s the planning process. Simple enough?

I’d love to hear from you if you are going to attempt this process. Leave me a comment. You’ll get bonus points if you share your written plan. I may even choose to share some of them as guest posts.

Here’s hoping for an extra productive this year!