I know this is the peak of the Christmas season, and you’re probably focusing on wrapping those last gifts, but this is also the biggest season of the year for Cultivate What Matters, and we are pumped! This is the time to start strategizing how you’re going to live your most purposeful life in 2018, and my girls and I at Cultivate What Matters are here to help you make that happen! It’s true that there’s nothing magical about January 1st, and you really can start living a more intentional life any day of the year, but man, it’s sure exciting and fun to start with a clean slate in a brand new year, am I right?*
Alright, let’s back up. If you’ve heard me talk about PowerSheets and Cultivate What Matters and you’re confused, this is your day! I’m going to explain. In short, I work for a small company run by nine amazing women, and together, we encourage and equip women to live their best lives by making little by little progress on their priorities. The PowerSheets are our best tangible tool for that mission. The PowerSheets are an intentional goal planner that helps you prioritize and tend to what’s important to you in the big picture by equipping you to make progress on the good stuff in your day-to-day life.
If you’re using them correctly you’ll rarely see the cover of these beauties (the good stuff is on the inside!), but still, aren’t the colors FUN?
Why I Use PowerSheets
The PowerSheets are not a traditional planner, in that there are no calendar pages in them. This is intentional, and it’s because PowerSheets are after something much deeper. You see, before I used PowerSheets I had a busy calendar, and I was drowning in to-do lists, but all of that working and checking off and running around in circles didn’t necessarily get me any closer to where I wanted to be. It may very well be a nice idea to cook five different meals one week, but that time and effort could be channeled into something more impactful if I doubled two recipes and microwaved those leftovers.
You see, good to-dos are always popping into my head. Before I used PowerSheets, I would write them down and tackle them blindly. But sometimes, the good to-dos kept me so busy I never got around to the best to-dos. Basically, I can spend my life checking off my self-imposed to-do list, but if I’ve never decided whether those things are part of the legacy I want to create, what’s the point?
PowerSheets are about progress, not perfection. They won’t help you make everything happen, but they can help you make the right things happen. PowerSheets walk you through a step-by-step process so that you can rest assured you’re spending your time where it counts. So that you’re doing the little things in your daily life that will lead to a feeling of excitement and pride at the end of next year. So that you can look back at your life when you’re 95 without regret.
One more quick note on the planner thing: the PowerSheets work with your planner. I keep my calendar in Google Cal these days, but if you use a physical planner you can take what you created through the PowerSheets and use that to fill your planner with much more meaningful tasks and appointments than you otherwise might. You are the captain now.
What’s In the PowerSheets
We have a lot of great community and resources over at Cultivate What Matters, but everything you really need is right inside the PowerSheets. There are three major sections.
- The PowerSheets Prep: The first 35 pages walk you through a series of prompts that help you uncover what matters to you. These are your unique goals.
- Intentional Action Plans: The next section walks you through how to create simple action plans for each of your goals with starting steps.
- Monthly Tending Sections: After you’ve named your goals and action plans, this is the part that actually helps you stick to them and live them out in your day-to-day! This includes creating monthly goals, weekly to-dos, and daily habits to track along the way.
Here’s the best part, y’all, this is FUN! It’s not full of guilt and failure like my typical “new year’s resolutions” were before. There is grace in this process. You get to renew and re-evaluate your goals each quarter. You can let go of things on your tending list you’ve decided don’t actually serve you well. We will cheer you on! But if something is truly important to you and you are faithful to this proven process, I believe you’ll feel the impact right off the bat.
What You Can Do Now
I’m really not a salesperson, but if you’re interested in getting into this, the best thing you can do is order the 2018 One-Year PowerSheets here. In the meantime, Lara is in the midst of her best series of the year for jumping in: read the 2018 goal-setting series here.
I love my job you guys. This is going to be the best year yet!
*A huge portion of the phrases, ideas, language, and examples I use in this post come directly from Lara Casey and Cultivate What Matters. I can’t even put everything in quotes that I got from my team, because the entire post is really theirs.
