Your Best Year Ever By Michael Hyatt.

Research has shown that only 9-12% of people surveyed keep their New Year's resolution.

If you fall in the same category as the 9-12% of people surveyed above, kudos. Unfortunately, I'm sure many of us (myself included) don't. In Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan For Achieving Your Most Important Goals, Michael Hyatt aims to help you overcome this problem by outlining proven steps to help you achieve your goals successfully.

The framework Hyatt shares in his book is based on five key points:

1. Every domain of your life is interrelated. Hyatt refers to the following domains: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, physical, marital, parental, social, vocational, avocational, and financial.
2. Every domain is important.
3. You can only achieve your goals when you have clarity on where you are right now.
4. You can improve each domain of your life.
5. Success is a by-product of personal growth.

Michael Hyatt's Five-Step Plan For Achieving Your Most Important Goals.

#1: Beliefs.

The first step towards successfully achieving your goals is recognising the importance of your belief system and identifying limiting beliefs.

What you believe can become your reality. Thus, it is essential to recognise and reject limiting beliefs. You can refine your beliefs to align with what you set out to achieve by "reframing it and restating the liberating truth. The trick is to start living as if it's true. The more we do so, the more we bring our experience into alignment with our expectations."

#2: The Past.

In this section, Hyatt introduces the concept of backward thinking.

Backward thinking is the process of learning from past experiences to facilitate greater progress in the future. To succeed in the future, you must “distil the lessons from your experiences so that they can serve as tools moving forward.”

Hyatt introduces two valuable tools that we can use to evaluate our past to progress forward:

1. The After-Action Review is a technique used by the US Army to improve performance and become better at what they do. It is a learning-focused method for assessing performance and analysing failures or possible improvements to future events.
2. The Power of Regret: Use your past regrets as a valuable tool to motivate and ensure that you are moving in the right direction to achieve your desired success.

In addition to the two above, Hyatt also highlights the importance of practising gratitude daily to help “amplify everything good in our lives.”

#3: The Future.

To achieve the future you desire, you must be intentional and clear about what you want and why achieving it is important.

Create a clear plan of action that can help you achieve your objective with the following:

1. Commit your goals in writing and use the SMARTER system:

S -Specific
M -Measurable
A -Actionable
R -Risky
T -Time-keyed
E -Exciting
R -Relevant

2. Strategize your goals and create habits you need to set to achieve those goals because “both achievement and habit goals can help us design the future we want.”

3. Set goals out of your comfort zone because “when it comes to meaningful achievements, comfort equals boredom and low engagement.”

#4: Your WHY.

“People lose their way when they lose their why.”

It is essential to understand why you want to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself.

Working towards a goal can be challenging; thus, a clear why can help motivate you to continue your plan during difficult times. Achieving “success requires help and usually lots of it.” Therefore, Hyatt advises that working towards a goal with others is always better than working alone.

“Nobody has the strength to do their life alone. Let’s be honest; it’s a two-person job at minimum. We stand a better chance of completing our goals when we work with others.”

#5: Start.

The final step is to master the art of START.

To start working towards your goals, Hyatt outlines three actionable steps:

1. Break down big goals into small, manageable steps.
2. Use action triggers—Action triggers or implementation intentions, as commonly referred to by goal researchers, are a strategy that can lead to better goal attainment when our mental and emotional resources are at their lowest.
3. Review your goals consistently and adapt where necessary.

Your Best Year Ever provides detailed resources and research to support Hyatt's steps. This book is an excellent start for those new to the concepts and methods of goal setting. Hyatt has taken the best techniques and created a step-by-step process to help you plan, strategise, and act to achieve your desired life.

Favourite quotes:

• "Goals poorly formulated are goals easily forgotten."
• "The first key difference between an unmet goal and personal success is the belief that it can be achieved."
• "Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion." – Muhammad Ali
• "Resources are never-, and I mean never- the main challenge in achieving our dreams."
• "Unless we learn from our experiences, we cant grow."
• "The only people with no hope are those with no regrets."
• "It is only with gratitude, life becomes rich." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• "The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them." – Denis Watley
• "Doing is better than not doing perfectly."
• "The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone and is a succession of little things that are brought together." – Vincent Van Gogh.