Setting Up Your Year for Success with the 12 Week Year → A More Beautiful Life Collective

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In this episode, we are getting ready for the New Year by talking all about goals, resolutions, and more. We talk about why it’s so important to live with intention this year, about why goal setting is biblical, and about 4 steps for making your goals. Then, we talk about setting up this year for goal-reaching success by using the 12 Week Year method.

S2E23 – How to Delight in God: Your Bible Study at Home Guide – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are talking about the basics of how to start a quiet time routine at home. Your Bible Study at Home can be a vibrant life-giving time. By including worship, prayer, and Bible reading, this can become your favorite time of day. You'll learn how to do this and more in this episode. Read more at the blog post: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/how-to-delight-in-god-your-bible-study-at-home-guide/ Get our Bible Study at Home Guide here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/99505f5a83 Get our FREE Color the Bible tracker here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/free-color-the-bible-reading-tracker/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. Want to support A More Beautiful Life Collective in the creation of podcasts, posts, and other resources? You can make a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation here. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hey everyone and welcome to Season 2 Episode 21. When this episode airs, it will be January 1st! Can you believe it? We’ve made it through another year, and we’re currently staring the new year head-on, a gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Do you feel that way?

Some of us face the New Year as the perfect time to reset and set new goals. Some of us live in denial. We can’t believe another year has passed us by. We think about the goals we made last year (if we can even remember them) and compare what we’ve done with the hopes and dreams we’ve had.

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Living with Intention this Year

Much of what we talk about on the podcast centers around one idea – that you need to take everything that you do and hold it up to the light of scripture. You have to see if what you are doing matches up with what scripture commands us to do.

Right now, I am currently in the weeks leading up to Christmas. For years, I’ve been meaning to cross-stitch matching collars for Christmas stockings for my husband and daughter. Growing up, my parents and my extended family on my mom’s side had matching stockings. My son and I have the same kind of stocking, but I never got around to making one for my husband and my daughter.

I had not done any cross stitch before, but I was committed to making this the year to finally get this project done. (And, maybe pick up a new hobby.) One thing I learned quickly is that cross-stitch is a relatively easy, relaxing pursuit, but it requires a lot of light. In the dark evening hours, I could easily have messy lines if I didn’t hold it up to the light and make sure my needle matched the hole in the fabric.

You may have had a similar experience to this even if you’ve never cross-stitched before. Have you ever been blindfolded and told to write or draw something? Or maybe told to type something on a keyboard without looking at your hands or the screen? If we just mindlessly go through the motions of life without inspecting what we are doing, then, we can often end up off-kilter. Our work will look slightly off.

This is what it means to live with intention. When we are living with intention, we live in the light of God’s truth. We can see clearly if the actions that we take match what scripture says.

Today, we are going to be talking about goal-setting, habit training, and New Year’s resolutions to ring in the New Year. As we talk about this, my goal for you is to have you hold up your goals, resolutions, and habits against the light of scripture. Live with intention this year.

We’ll first talk about how to set goals. Then, we’ll talk about 5 principles of the 12 Week Year to help you accomplish your goals and more this year.

Goal Setting is Biblical

Everyone has different opinions about setting goals. I believe that goals are a good thing. They help us to live with intentionality and purpose. Just like routines give structure to our days, allowing us to do what we want to do with our time, our goals give structure to our hopes and desires. Instead of being ‘blown and tossed by the wind’ – by whatever new and shiny thing crosses our path – we set our sights on what we know is good.

If you have made God your first desire in life, you can set goals and dreams with the understanding that they will be glorifying to him.

So, as we look forward to the New Year, my first admonition is just a reminder that planning is good and is commanded (with a couple of caveats). Don’t be one of those people who looks at the New Year and shrugs saying, “What’s the point of making a goal? I know that I’m just not going to keep it.” Walk forward into the year with intentionality.

4 Steps for Making Goals this New Year

Step 1. Do a Yearly Review

Now that you are committed to making a goal with me, the next thing we need to do is talk about what type of goals you could make. Last year around this time, we talked about doing a yearly review and creating a theme of the year. A yearly review is an excellent way to take stock of what you accomplished over the course of 12 months. All too often, we make goals in January about what we will do this year, and then life throws a whole bunch of curveballs at us. We end up at a completely different spot at the end of the year than what we thought we would be, but it’s important to recognize why. Is it because of our lack of discipline? Or is it because of the new life circumstances we have?

At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t pregnant. I wanted a big garden and maybe even some livestock. Come May, I was bedridden with morning sickness. No garden was planted this year. Life throws you curveballs, but at the end of the year, I’m waiting patiently for the arrival of baby #3. Those curveballs can be blessings. But, we need to take stock of our habits, our pain points and shame points, and other areas of refinement we desire in our lives.

Step 2. Create Your Theme of the Year

Once we have done a yearly review, we can create a theme for the year. We can explore what we want this New Year to be about. Your theme of the year sets the tone for your year. It is a short statement that defines what you would like this year to be about.

I truly think there’s value in doing this process of imagining a few times a year. Too often, we get stuck in a rut that starts to feel more and more comfortable. Before we know it, 5 years have gone by with no significant goals met or life changes occurring. We are just swept along by the stream of our responsibilities. Take a break, and just imagine what you wish you could accomplish. What do you want your life to be?

Step 3. Create a list of potential goals.

Some of us may stop there, but others would like to be more definite. Generally, being specific can help you to actually realize change because it provides you with some actionable steps. Your theme of the year can act as a lens through which you can determine if a goal you want to do aligns with your overall vision for the year.

On the blog, we’ve gone through several different areas of life where you can make goals. You can find 20 goal ideas here. Some ideas could be starting a podcast, writing a book, creating a business, learning a new hobby, connecting with a new (or old) friend once a week, or fostering family time – really the sky is the limit.

In an episode on goal-setting, I gave some ideas for how to set goals when you are feeling burnt out using the acronym, ASSET. You can also get the workbook for that process in the shop. Ultimately, we can only focus on a few goals at a time. You can’t change everything in your life all at once.

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How many goals should you focus on at once? Probably no more than three for all the areas of your life. Some things that you do won’t necessarily have to be a goal that you are working towards. It’s just a habit that you’ve cultivated.

I’ve done a 52 book a year reading challenge for several years (and this year I actually am up to 85 books). I don’t have to make this a goal that I am actively working towards because I just read as a habit. But, when it comes to exercise, I seriously struggle and almost always give up. My reading challenge wouldn’t be one of my goals, but exercise could be.

Your goals could be for your business or professional pursuits. It could be for your home and health. It could be for your family, church, or other relationships. But, just try and limit them to three per 12 weeks so that you can actually do what it takes to reach them.

We’ll talk about the 12 week year in just a minute, but this format helps you to reach more goals across the span of a year. Remember, if you are dividing up your year into 12 weeks, you’ll have an opportunity to reset and change your goals as the year goes on. Not focusing on one area doesn’t mean that you’ll never focus on it. It just means you’re prioritizing what’s most important in the immediate future.

Step 4. Create your 12 Week Year

We’d like to because we are often driven by our emotions. We like to deal in projects not habits. When we are feeling motivated, we’ll exercise, fill in all the budget trackers, and make and prep meals for the next three weeks. However, a month later that motivation has waned. The tennis shoes collect dust by the door, the budget trackers have about 3 expenses on them, and the fridge is empty – all the prepped meals are thrown in the trash.

So, how can we make and keep our goals?

Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington wrote a book in 2013 called The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months. I was struck by how this book really takes everything that we’ve talked about with habits and puts them in an actionable plan.

If I were to ask you what your goals were last year – or even your theme of the year, many of us would struggle to remember. It’s hard to have sticking power that lasts through the year in the midst of all the curveballs of life. The 12 Week Year helps you get focused to accomplish more so that you can reach your goals and more.

5 Principles of the 12 Week Year

Here are 5 principles of the 12 Week Year that will help you to reach your goals this year.

Principle #1. Periodization > Annualization

Unless you’ve just had a really rough year, most of us are pretty hopeful about new beginnings. As I mentioned before, we often idealize the upcoming year and head into it with guns blazing. We fall prey to the project way of thinking. After a few weeks, the shininess of the New Year wears off.

In the 12 Week Year, the authors talk about the importance of setting goals within a realistic timeframe. A year is just too long. There is too much that happens. We can stick with our goals for a while, but often we start to lag in our progress.

More than that, we also tend to procrastinate. Instead of going above and beyond our goals, we put off even getting started because we feel like we have more time left. In the business world, sales generally peak at the end of a fiscal year whether that’s in July or December. We probably know the feeling of procrastinating and then rushing to meet a deadline.

We can use this tendency to our advantage instead of being hampered by it. When we think in terms of 12 weeks, we have a heightened sense of urgency and an increased focus on the critical few tasks that we need to complete to really make gains.

At the end of the 12 week year, you can pause, reset, and refocus making a new set of goals and plans for the upcoming set. Importantly, when you think in terms of 12 weeks, it’s much harder to ignore when you are falling behind what you said you would do. You have to confront failure and pivot accordingly. But, don’t despair. Each 12 weeks is a fresh start. If you’ve had a bad 12 weeks, you just turn and face the new set with a renewed focus to do what’s right this go round.

Principle #2. Create 12 Weekly Plans with Tactics to reach your goals

I mentioned before that the end of the year is the perfect time to do a yearly review. This can help you to make a vision for the upcoming year. But, make sure that you don’t stop there. In order to do the 12 week year, you use that vision or theme of the year to make a goal for your 12 week year. This could be a personal goal related to health, finances, relationships, or your home. Or it could be a business goal. You could also do a combination of both, but just make sure that you are not spreading yourself too thin.

Once you’ve made your overarching goal, then, you need to break that goal down into 12 weekly plans. So, if your goal is to get your finances in order, then, your weekly plan would include steps in that process like (1) track your spending, (2) make a budget, (3) make a debt analysis, and (4) build up emergency savings. You have to be realistic about what you want to achieve in the time that you have.

These baby steps are called tactics. They are basically the habits we need to cultivate in order to reach the overarching goal we’ve set for ourselves. For each of your tactics, you need to assign a week due. Some of these tactics may be repeated. Other tactics may only happen once in the 12 weeks.

In our finances example, a tactic would be to track your spending each morning. It could also be to meal plan and prep (to reduce grocery budget). It could be to skip your morning coffee out and pack your lunch. It could be to remove Amazon from your phone. Each of these things is a baby step toward your weekly goals.

Your weekly plans provide a roadmap for how you will actually accomplish the 12 week year goal. If you ‘fail to plan, you plan to fail.’ So many of us make lofty New Year’s resolutions and then fail to plan. We don’t meet our goals because we run into the friction of life. We don’t know how to start and so months go by without making any progress.

Principle #3. Score Your Tactic Execution Each Week

The most crucial part of this process comes in principle three. Planning out your goals in 12 weekly plans while creating tactics to help you reach your goals will help you feel like you have a roadmap to meeting your goals. But, this will only take you so far. You have to then act on your goals.

This is where the breakdown occurs for most people. Some people just never get started. They have the best of intentions, but life happens and they stay in their comfort zone. Others go all-in 100% on the first day. But, they get distracted by Week 3.

In the 12 Week Year format, you add in an element of data-driven evaluation to make sure that you are on the right track to meet your goals. Each week, you fill in a Weekly Score Card. This card includes your overall goal, your weekly goal, and your weekly habits. Each day, you mark whether or not you completed your tactics.

At the end of the week, you figure out the percentage of tactics completed. This becomes your execution score. The authors recommend that you shoot for an execution score of 85% if you want to reach your goals.

They make the distinction between lead and lag indicators. A lag indicator is the big end result that shows whether or not you meet your overall goals. If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, the lag indicator would be your weight. It’s called this because it lags behind your actual progress. It’s good to measure your lag indicators, but it is one of the final data points you receive. You won’t know if you need to pivot and make a change quickly enough if you rely on your lag indicators.

Lead indicators on the other hand are the tactics that help you to reach the overall goals. If you want to lose 10 pounds, you probably need to change your diet and add in exercise. A lead indicator would be your daily calorie & macronutrient intake and your exercise minutes. If you fail to do your tactics each day, you know pretty quickly that you will not reach your goals.

Principle #4. Schedule the 12 Week Year into your day

You need to have time built into your week to work on your goals. If you want to actually achieve an 85% completion rate on the execution of our tactics, we can’t spend the whole week ‘meaning to do something’ but never actually doing it. This requires two commitments from us.

(1) We have to schedule the tactics of the 12 Week Year into our day. We need to let the weekly plans that we make guide our days and refer back to them frequently in our days. I incorporated my weekly plan into my planner. I check that I am completing tactics after each meal (a form of habit stacking). If I notice I am behind on something, then I still have time to course correct that day. It also helps remind me of what my focus should be on that day.

(2) We have to schedule a weekly review time each week to reflect on our progress from the previous week, problem-solve, and set a course for the upcoming week. Business professionals recommend setting aside at least 3 hours a week to work on your business, not in it. You need time to look at what you are doing from a bird’s eye view to gain clarity on potential issues and make a plan to resolve them. Too many of us are caught up in the hamster wheel of life. We could all benefit from this time of reflecting on our priorities, accomplishments, and activities.

Principle #5. Find People to Help You Stay Accountable to Your Goals

The last principle of the 12 Week Year is to find people to help you stay accountable to your goals. These people can’t make you reach your goals, but if you establish a group that is committed to weekly check-ins, then it will help you stay motivated and clear on your progress.

You should tell the people about your goals, any results, and your weekly execution score. Then, together problem solve how you will better reach your goals next week. Weekly Accountability meetings. The 12 Week Year calls these meetings the Weekly Accountability Meetings. It says, “The WAM is used to confront breakdowns, recognize progress, create focus, and encourage action.”

Benefits of the 12 Week Year

Provides a small period of time in which you are making and keeping goals. It’s easy for your goals to have sticking power and to act on your goals because you’ve made a proper plan.
Provides a structured time to rest, recharge, and refocus on what you want to do. At the end of the 12 week year, you should celebrate your accomplishments. You can take a vacation, go out for dinner, or find some other way to acknowledge what you’ve accomplished. The 13th week is like a Sabbath week. Use this time to rest and then you can create a new plan for the upcoming year.
Can be started at any time in the year. You don’t have to wait for the new year, new season, or start of the school year to start the 12 week year process. All you have to do is set a vision and then make a plan.
It’s easy to see breakdowns in your execution. If you aren’t completing your tactics/habits each week, then it won’t surprise you that you didn’t reach your weekly and overarching goals. It also helps you to see what routines, habits, and strategies you need to use in the future.

What is your goal for the next 12 weeks?

As you head into the New Year, steal an hour or two to do a yearly review and create your theme of the year. And, then brainstorm what your goal could be for the next 12 weeks. It’s important that we are productive for the kingdom and that we steward our time effectively. When we live with intention, we can accomplish great things for God.

What are your goals? Comment below!

Don’t forget to like and subscribe to never miss an episode. While you’re there, you can comment and leave a rating and review.

Check out the shop for resources to help you set goals and live with intention this year.

Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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