2024 Intention and Goal Setting
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Four years ago, I made a major professional shift. I’d spent 22 years as a design leader in tech and I was finally ready to leave the corporate world and start my own business. Today, I’m an executive coach to Series A (and beyond) founders, author and keynote speaker focused on leadership, “otherness,” and creating your brand.
Through this journey, I’ve held different North Star visions for each year, as I simultaneously helped my clients and community set intentions for their years to come. As my self-leadership developed, my process has changed.
This last quarter of 2023 has been the most challenging period of my life, mainly due to personal and family priorities. While I continued serving my existing clients and speaking engagements, I pretty much stopped doing any outreach or new business development. I simply had to ruthlessly prioritize as my energy was laser focused on my family. However, my other priority was to become clear on what mattered to me most in 2024. Through the last three months, I’ve had that professional (and personal) goal gestating in the back of my mind. It didn’t need to take any active energy, yet I knew it was something I wanted to figure out by the end of the year.
One memory kept coming back to me repeatedly. My parents loved to travel, and when I was about six years old, we went on a family trip to Taiwan. According to family lore, my sister and I were at a temple and threw some fortune sticks. My older sister went first. She threw her sticks and received “middling fortune.” Now, anyone who knows our family, knows that my sister is viewed as pretty successful. I stepped up next to kneel, shake the container, and throw my sticks. I received “supreme fortune.” The ongoing family joke is that my sister is doing pretty well and if that is considered to be ”middling fortune,” we’re all still waiting for Tutti’s “supreme fortune.”
This is as bit of a silly story, and yet that memory kept coming back to me. Memories and emotions, similar to values, can help create a touchstone for an intention.
At the same time, as I reflected on my past two years with my business coach, I realized that I’d also shied away from setting monetary goals. I’d spent 22 years in my first career hustling and working hard, at the expense of time with my young girls, my marriage, and my own spaciousness. I knew how to set SMART goals and OKRs and then regularly hitting and exceeding them. In this new career, I was afraid of being setting big ambitious goals because to me, that big goal setting would automatically come with hustling.
I wrote my first book, Make Space to Lead: Break Patterns and Focus on What Matters Most, in a rapid 10 months from conception to launch — the process was most definitely not spacious! Yet through writing about the concepts and putting out the intention that this was the way of living that I yearned for, I’ve now realized that through 2022 and 2023, I’ve achieved balance and space in my integrated professional and personal life. We write what we most need to learn!
Intention-setting for me this year is a mixture of divergent, dreamy thinking (memories! emotions!) as well as structured goal setting, full of actions & metrics.
My intention for 2024 is “Supreme Fortune.” I have three above the line goals — to have this level of supreme abundance in my energy/capacity, with my two daughters, and in my love life. Those are the top priority.
Then, if those are not compromised, I am seeking wealth in my professional business. Supreme Fortune is a rich life.
Once I had the intention, the goals were easier. I’m sharing my professional business goals, although there are personal ones as well. While these look like a long list, they will be spread out as sub-goals for each quarter in 2024. And if I don’t reach them all, it’s okay. The goals are less important than the overarching intention for the year. And in this changing landscape, I can be certain of my Q1 goals while everything else is a rough swag. As humans, we tend to be bad at predicting the future, the further out it is.
Intention
Supreme Fortune. Three facets above the line (Energy, Love life, and Daughters). When those aren’t compromised, then Wealth.
Goals (and some roadmap)
Financial: 1.5x my revenue from 2023 with a mixture of coaching, consulting and speaking / workshops.
Speaking / Workshops: develop two new keynote speeches through a new speaking training program
Writing: Pivot my existing book proposal into an adjacent broader topic, learning from this past year, and creat a plan for publishing
Writing: Continue writing for HBR, Fast Company, etc. creating one pitch a month
Experiments: Develop a new self-service course with Udemy for Business — Developing Your Leadership Brand Using Generative AI
Deepening my personal shamanic practice
You can see a history of my intention-setting over the past 4 years with Grow (2020), White Space (2021), Satisfied (2022), and Shapeshifter (2023). My process changes and adapts over the years but it always has a combination of feeling / emotion / intuition plus more traditional structured goal-setting. If you’d like an overview of the process, take a look at my article on personal OKRs.