As I mentioned in Post #5, I am a big goal setter. If given the option, I will sit down and read with a cup of coffee for hours and not make progress on things that are important to me, so I try to make sure that I have goals chosen to prevent me from spending all my time reading and never making progress on any of the other areas of my life that matter to me!
Each year, I buy a set of PowerSheets from Cultivate What Matters. The first part of the PowerSheets goes through their system for identifying what matters on a big-scale and then what needs to happen this year to make progress on those big-scale priorities. PowerSheets has a space to set eight goals. I have been using PowerSheets since 2021, and each of these years I have set eight goals. This year, though, I decided to set more than eight.
I am sure that I will do a post specific to PowerSheets at some point, but today I just want to talk about my 2025 goals. Cultivate What Matters outlines seven Cultivated Life Evaluation categories with an eighth category that you can customize. These are the categories:
I set eleven goals for this year. There is at least one in each category except community because I ended 2024 really happy with my community involvement.
My first goal for this year was a spiritual growth goal: continue my morning prayer ritual. I have building this ritual since October of 2024, and it started with me listening to an episode of Ascension Press’s Podcast “Bible in a Year” with Father Mike Schmitz while I followed along in my Bible. Since then, I have added prayer journaling in a Mary Square prayer journal, praying for my husband using The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie OMartian, and writing in my One Line a Day journal. All of this takes me about forty-five minutes, and I love starting my day this way.
My second goal for this year was to start growing our family. I have already talked about our struggle with infertility in Post #4. Sean and I decided at the end of 2024 that we felt called to grow our family through Embryo Adoption which I talk about in Post #8. We are scheduled for our first transfer on August 28th, so I am considering this goal complete!
I customized my eighth category to be Rest, Joy, and Delight. My third goal for the year is in this category, and it is directly related to goal two. I want to create margin in my schedule for when our family grows. My fourth goal is to finish my Master’s in Theological Studies. That being done will certainly help create margin. I also let my pastor know that I will not be returning to help with our parish’s youth group for the 2025-2026 academic year. I resigned from my position as a Disney Travel Agent which I enjoyed doing but took up so much time. I transition on July 1st to a full-time faculty contract where I can work remotely. This past year I worked in an hourly staff position that had an expectation of in-person work and taught as an adjunct one course each semester. This new position is going to make a huge difference in my flexibility. All of these changes make me feel that I have completed this goal!
My fourth goal, as mentioned above, was completing my Master’s in Theological Studies. I graduated in May, so this is complete, too! I do have the dream of getting a Ph.D., and I did start the application process this past fall. However, I made the decision that focusing on growing our family and accepting a full-time faculty contract at the college I work at is more important to me in this season.
My fifth and sixth goals are under health and wellness. The fifth is to fuel my body well and the sixth is to move my body well. These are the goals I have seen the least/most inconsistent growth so far this year. I prefer how I feel when I am eating low-carb. I really like Ruth Soukup’s brand Thinlicious. I use quite a bit of their recipes and like to listen to and read their posts, emails, and podcasts. I also use Home Chef for keto dinners that are easy and quick to prepare a couple times a week. That link is my referral link where you can try Home Chef for $4.99 a serving! As far as movement, I really like Soul Core. Sean and I belong to our local YMCA, but we do not go as often as I would like.
My seventh goal this year is to pay off our debt. Since the beginning of the year, we have paid off our Hilton Grand Vacation membership. I would like to pay off the remainder of my student loans this year, and we are making slow but steady progress on this. I track all our spending, debt, and savings using You Need a Budget (YNAB). This link is my referral link. If you sign up, we both get a month free! For the first three years of our marriage, I track all our finances using Aspire Budgeting’s free Google Sheet. I do like Aspire, but this year I decided to splurge and try YNAB. It has saved me hours of work, and I like it better!
My eighth goals is to continue a weekly home reset ritual and a daily tidy ritual. This goal has definitely been hit-or-miss this year. We will do a weekly home reset multiple weeks in a row, and then we’ll go a few weeks without doing any type of cleaning and the mess will get overwhelming. I use a recurring task on Sunsama to keep track of the tasks I like to get done during my weekly home reset ritual. Sunsama is my absolute favorite planning tool. This link is my referral link, and if you use it, we both get a month free. I would like to increase the frequency of my weekly home rituals in the second half of this year, but I do believe that our home has been tidier this year than it was last year even with us only doing this ritual infrequently. A daily tidy ritual definitely did not happen this pat season. I am looking forward to the start of my new contract. I will have more flexibility to be at home, and one of the things I am hoping to prioritize is creating some sort of daily tidying ritual. I try to view tending our home as a ritual part of taking care of our little family. I love our home, and I want to take care of it well!
Cultivate What Matters has a category for work and learning. I have historically used that category for my educational pursuits. I place my “work” goals under a category I created that I call “Vocation.” This year, my ninth goal was to teach well. In the first half of the year, I taught my second ever college course: History and Philosophy of Education. I had not taught this course before, so I designed it from scratch. I was very happy with how it turned out. This fall I am supposed to be teaching three courses. One is the same course I taught last fall: Integrating the Arts in the Elementary School Classroom. The other two are courses I have not taught before. I will be working on updating the one course and creating the other two this summer.
For my eleventh and twelfth goals, I am going back to the category I customized to be “Rest, Joy, and Delight.” My eleventh goal is to read 52 books. I like to read a mix of non-fiction books about topics such as theology, planning, and education, classic fiction books, and then fun closed-door romance books. So far this year, I have read forty-eight, so I am thinking that I am going to reach this goal. I will make a post on what I read in the first half of the year, but it was definitely an eclectic mix! You can also follow me on Goodreads here.
My twelfth goal is to use my Silk + Sonder journal. I purchased an annual subscription of these journals. Last month I switched my subscription from paper to digital planners. I am really enjoying some aspects of this journal but not others. I started using it in 2022, and I have used it off and on since then. I will probably write a post about my thoughts on Silk + Sonder at some point! The above link is my referral link. If you order, you get $10 off, and I get a $10 credit.
To conclude, here are my 2025 goals:
I’d love to hear what goals you are working on! Comment below, or email me at elisabeth@mission-today.com.
Mission Today 