Summer is coming close to an end and university is about to begin. This could be a great time to evaluate and look back at the past year and reflect on both the positive and the negative whilst creating new goals for the future! Maybe take this time to truly meditate on the areas of your life that you want to work on.

As you are going through the different areas in your life, try reflecting on said goals and ask yourself these fundamental questions:

What are my deepest beliefs in this area of my life that control my behaviour?

What do I want to achieve in this area of my life?

Why do I want to achieve this? 

What can I do to achieve my goals in this area?  

Create your vision and Goals

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Illustration courtesy of Hurca!™

Create your life vision. What does your ultimate, ideal life look like? Make a vision board and fill it with different pictures that contribute to what you want to achieve, if you can see it and plan it, you might as well go achieve it!

What does your quality of life look like?

How do you wish to spend the next few days and years of your life?

Knowing the answer to these questions will reward you with great emotional breakthroughs, spiritual experiences, and intellectual advances; but most importantly it will help you greatly with your progress towards becoming a better version of yourself.

Intellectual life

Take a look at your intellectual life, think about thinking. In the case of us IE students, I would say actually study, take time to understand the material you are learning. Your intellectual life has the potential to move you towards your life’s goals! Think about your career and your financial life. Explore the amazing rewards that come with a great career (whatever it may be for you) such as the fulfillment it can bring into your life. Go one step further and learn new ways to take your career to a higher level! As a bonus round, you could end up making a better income.  

Financial aspect

Right now, most of us are IE students who are incredibly lucky that we have our parents or guardians helping us out with our “monetary situation”. As students we can learn to budget, save and spend appropriately, of course with a bit of splurging every once in a while. We can also follow IE innovation missions and find new innovative ways we can earn for ourselves. These are some ideas regarding the financial area of your life, but you decide how you want that area of your life to look like along with all the other areas.   

Social and Love life

What about your social life? Evaluate your relationship with your friends. Truly look at the people you choose to surround yourself with and look out for the ones you think will have a positive impact in your life. Find ways to strengthen the relationships that are most important to you. Call your friends, ask them how they are doing, appreciate them for who they are, and let unhealthy relationships go. While we are on the subject of relationships, what do you hope for in terms of a “love life”? What are your expectations? What do you value in a partner? This area is not a necessity or mandatory. You don’t need a boyfriend or girlfriend to be happy and be your best self. Sure they can be great and loving someone else is a beautiful thing, but I would recommend loving yourself first.

Emotional Life

Envision your emotional life! Explore the nature of your emotions, develop your emotional intelligence and discover how to channel your emotions in a way that benefits you. Question if automatically reacting is really the best way to handle a situation. Above all, understand that it is okay to not feel okay. Everyone is going to have difficult times and everyone has bad days. It’s okay to cry, feel angry, and get frustrated. Just don’t let one bad moment ruin a day and don’t let one event ruin a whole year. Maybe try focusing on the positive and practice gratitude. 

Find new activities that help you control your emotional life. Health and Fitness is a great way to blow off some steam whilst also taking care of your body in the process. For some, having a spiritual life is very important. Meditation is a great way to focus on your breathing and is an activity that allows you to have some time for yourself (highly recommend trying it). 

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llustration courtesy of Daan Snels

Turn your goals into reality

Building character. This is fundamental as it can affect every other area in your life. Define the person that you want to be, the person that is going to achieve all the goals in the different areas you have chosen for yourself. With time, you will learn to incorporate character traits you wish to build into your life and further develop yourself into a better version of who you are.  

So grab a notebook and write everything down, all your thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Use this journal to keep track of your progress, look back if you feel as if you haven’t achieved much or feel lost and unmotivated, as it will help you remember why you started this in the first place. 

Something important to keep in mind as well is that you may not succeed on your first try. That’s okay. Try again, fail, try harder, fail, fail again, fail better, learn from your failure, do it again, succeed. You are only going to get better by actually doing the work. 

In the end, these goals will not define who you are, but will be part of who you are. We can all be so much more than what we believe we can.

Note: I want to thank MindValley as they were a huge part in the inspiration for this article.  

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