Practical Helps for 2026 Goal Setting

The Helm

Happy new year. It’s the time for new ideas, new beginnings, new plans and goals, and new resolutions that will likely fall apart once we get into the year in the same way Bible reading plans fall apart once you get to Leviticus.

To offer you some wind in your sails for your January optimism, I want to share with you the story about how I’ve failed at my own goal setting, then follow up with two practical frameworks to avoid the mistakes I made.

Got your favorite pen or pencil and journal ready? You’re going to want to write some things down before the end.

Clash of Tides

I didn’t think my goals were unrealistic. Action goals, family goals, faith goals, financial goals, friendship goals, writing goals. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail, right? So, I made a ton of plans - I even wrote them down! - and I was still failing with my own personal goals. What gives? I had an “Aha!” moment I did not like.

In the spring of 2025, I was attending a series of leadership workshops, and one of them was by Dr. Mattel Knowles on goal setting. We went through a few different learning and discovery exercises, but this was a crushing and humbling experience for me. As an unintended consequence of the session, it was eye-opening to see why a lot of the goals I had been setting were not successful.

This is crazy to me. Professionally, I’ve always been rated high in competencies of teamwork and analysis and decision making. One of my current responsibilities is departmental goal setting, proposals with Wildly Important Goals (WIG), input lead measures, and realistic commitments, and reporting with a team of 16 people. We have dates and deadlines and accountability meetings. Our proposals go before committees to ensure they align with organization wide goals. Our team meets our input lead measures, and more often than not, meets our goals.

So what was wrong with me? As I sat and listened to Dr. Knowles, a difficult truth began to emerge. Maybe you’ve already spotted it in the last paragraph. With a sinking feeling in my gut that drained my enthusiasm, I had the revelation that the reason I was not accomplishing my personal goals is because they were dependent on others. I had embarrassingly co-dependent goals. That means I couldn’t move forward unless those I had mentally teamworked into my personal goals were meeting my input measures in lockstep with me. My goals were fragile and my failures became buried under excuses.

It’s one thing to have aspirational goals and it’s another thing to seriously think about them. This is where your paper and pencil/pen come into play, because I’d ask yourself if you’re actually serious about a goal if you aren’t even willing to write it down. This keeps you out of being merely a dreamer and enables you to also follow up your dreams with doing. There’s plenty of people who will tell you that you need to find your WHY, which is the motivation behind your goals. That is an important question and you should ask it, but I want to focus on an additional question. You have to ask HOW you’re going to accomplish your goals. You have to get practical and accountable. You may not succeed at your goals, but if you have realistic HOW steps, you can look at what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust from there.

I want to provide two valuable frameworks for working on your own goals so you can increase the probability you’ll stick to them.

(1) Set S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S - Specific. Vague goals don’t help you accomplish them. “Lose more weight, get in better shape, spend less money and save more money” are not goals. They’re aspirations, and they’re missing the bullseye you need to hit. That’s why you miss them.

A specific goal answers vital questions: Why am I doing this? What steps am I actually going to take? What are my tools or my limits? How am I going to accomplish this goal?

Instead of “grow spiritually,” and example of what your goal could be is “Read the Bible and pray, then make one entry in a journal, before checking my phone every morning.” Instead of “be a better father,” you could set a goal like “I’m going to initiate family worship every evening before bedtime.”

What is your specific goal?

M - Measurable. This isn’t putting legalistic requirements into your specific goals. It’s setting the steps you commit to in comparison with your goal so that you can determine if you’re actually following through. It’s the honest look in the mirror that says, “How am I going to know I’m actually putting the work in?” To be measurable is to know when the work is complete, and you can rest easy. If you create habit trackers in a journal, it’s when you can check the box for that day.

If your specific goal was to read the Bible, how many chapters or verses will it be? If your goal is to initiate family worship, what does that include? If your specific goal is to workout every day or every other day, how many sets and reps will you do? The vague aspirational specific is “I’m going to do pushups every morning” versus the measurable specific is “I’m going to do three sets of ten pushups every morning.”

A - Achievable. This doesn’t mean you take it easy on yourself but if you’ve been on the slow side, starting by running marathons or a 6-minute mile isn’t going to help you sustain your goals. Building an home gym sounds like a great goal but if you don’t have the equipment or the money to buy it all at once, then it’s not going to work. Achievable means possible within your current season of constraints. It’ll take humility and creativity to do what you can with what you have.

Can you wake up an extra 30 minutes early to get in that study, or that workout? Do you have the skills or tools you need to do the job? Learning to work on your own car is great but I wouldn’t start with changing the timing chain. Be realistic with your goals as you set them. A goal that requires other people to change, ideal circumstances, or a version of you that hasn’t arrived yet, it’s aspirational and not actually achievable.

R - Relevant. Your goal may be a good goal but does it fit with where you are in life right now? Investing is a great thing to do, but if you’re drowning in debt, investing may not be the relevant goal to work on. Learning a new skill may be valuable, but does it fit the calling God has placed on my life? Relevancy is where you look at your life and your goals and determine if there is opposition between the two. Not like, I’m jittery and can’t sleep so I need to cut back on energy drinks, but if I’m trying to stabilize my home life while working longer hours for the promotion, then one of those isn’t a relevant goal to the other, and you have to decide which spinning plate is going to fall.

T - Time Bound. When do you aim to have reached a milestone in your goal? In one of my best goal keeping moments, I wrote Pray Then Plow in 5 months because I had a whiteboard with milestones I needed to reach each week. Once I finished with the rough draft, I never gave myself a deadline again and now it’s been sitting in my works saved folder, ready for Kindle Direct Publishing, and I didn’t do it yet. Setting arbitrary deadlines for yourself keeps you accountable to yourself, and it also keeps you from stacking up the work until it becomes a soul-crushing mountain of overwhelm. Doing 1/6th of the work every day (Sundays off for the sabbath) is more sustainable than waiting to do it all at the last minute. It also reveals what you chose to spend your time on. Doomscrolling and online shopping is more of a consumer than the consumer.

All of this takes work. It takes work to plan it out. It takes work to answer each question. I had a goal of reading The Magician’s Nephew as a family read-aloud over my Christmas break but I never moved it beyond aspirational to write down what steps I would actually put in to make it happen.

Will 2026 be the year you escape the gravitational black hole you’re in with a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound goal? We don’t have to pretend that we sovereignly control the outcomes, but we can have agency over what efforts we make to work towards them.

(2) Put Off / Put On

It can be overwhelming to look at all that needs to be done as you feel the sting of guilt and remorse over what you haven’t done. You’ve worked to get rid of negative patterns and behaviors in your life, but when you got rid of them, their absence left a vacuum and either those old behaviors were sucked right back in or something worse took their place.

Let’s try a few.

Want to put off interrupting? Put on waiting for others to finish talking.

Want to put off impulse spending? Put on prayer that asks, “Is this who I want to be?” in the moments the impulses arrive. For heaven’s sake get your saved credit/debit card information off your phone and shop locally. Take some ease out of the spending and put some resistance between your and the cash register.

Speaking of impulses… Want to put off lust and pornography or inappropriate flirting? Put on memorizing a fighter verse (like 2 Corinthians 5:21) to wield in the moments you feel weak. Memorize it so you don’t have to fumble with pulling a notecard out of your pocket. Want to put off foxes like these, along with disconnection and poor communication? Start initiating by making positive investments for your spouse - while not making their response or lack thereof the arbiter of your action.

Want to put off weight? Put on exercise and strength training.

Want to put off binge eating? Keep apples and carrots on hand that have filling fiber in them instead of salty and sugary snacks that are engineered to make you crave more and therefore buy more.

Want to start a Bible reading and study rhythm? Put off what’s consuming your time and put on a good hard or softcover Bible and notebook and taking notes.

Want to put off going nowhere? Go somewhere and start with writing it down. The reality is unless we start actively making decisions with commitment and intentionality, we’re going to just float along in the current of whatever’s happening around us. We’ll drift in the culture around us, our family cultures will become non-cultures, and instead of going against the flow to make a positive impact in this world, we’ll be swept along with with everyone else when the floods finally come.

Want to put off feeling guilty? Put on asking yourself if there’s any truth to the reason you feel guilty, then take that as feedback to make a new goal out of it. Get rid of the reasons to feel guilty instead of the person who shed light on it, whether intentional or not. Ultimately, only Jesus can fully takeaway our guilt because He paid for all of our sins in the cross. What worse could be said about us than it took the death of the Son of God to pay the wages of our sin?

Do you have a hard time saying no? Start with small things and build from there. After all, every yes is a no to something. Every hour you say yes to doomscrolling is a no to reading. Every hour you’re present with your device is an hour you aren’t present with those you love. Every no to vulnerable conversation is a yes to distance in the relationship. Every yes to a child’s tantrum is a no to peace in the home.

These are just some examples, but with S.M.A.R.T. goals and the biblical principle of putting off an old behavior and then putting on a new one in its place, you’ve got some framework to actually keep with you’re resolutions and goals this year.

And if you don’t stick to it, we’re going to revisit this topic in a couple months by talking about difficulties.

The Armory

We will lose hope if it’s all up to us. I found this out, too. At one point, I was working REAL HARD on cold emailing clients trying to get traction on freelance writing. I had a spreadsheet of over 100 decision makers that I was emailing weekly to see if it was the right time for them to need a writer they didn’t have to have on the payroll. Getting on a retainer was goal, and having 3-4 retainers was the dream achievement. I picked my niche, I handpicked the targets, I kept on a consistent track, I pivoted from one industry to another after weeks of no responses or “no thank you’s”, I went through video modules and worked with a coach to identify weak points as sunk costs of courses motivated me to do this for months.

And it amounted to… nothing. Loss. Shame. Discouragement.

It wasn’t the path I was to take. Maybe one day the retainer dream will arrive, but it’s not going to be by the methods I was using. There’s also another element to this. Maybe that story was not mine to know at that point in time.

If you’re beating your head against a wall and still haven’t gotten anywhere, it’s possible the Lord simply is not blessing your efforts. It’s possible that the route you want to take is not the route that He has for you. It’s possible your dreams are too small, your goals are too close, and if the Lord is not blessing your plans then your efforts will be in vain.

How do you armor up with that? Lay your goals and plans at the Lord’s feet in prayer, ask for His blessing, and submit to Him that as much as you want to see success that if your plans aren’t what He has for you that He wouldn’t bless them.

Honestly, our goals ought to all be laid at His feet. Our ambitions and aspirations may be good, but they may not be what God has for us. Our destination may be the horizon, and while we have grand ideas to take the rolling hills and paths to mountain peaks to get there, the Lord may take us through the valley and its furnaces to get us there. The destination is the same, but the only way we’re actually going to arrive at where the Lord wants us is through the tribulations of suffering.

Unless the Lord builds the house, it’s in vain that we build.

What is our life? A mist that vanishes at dawn.

Sunbreak Stories

Even as we submit our plans to the Lord, it doesn’t mean we become realistic and throw it all up in the air and say, “Whatever the Lord wills!”

I’m going to cheat here by not telling a specific story, but by sharing a few accounts and articles of those who frequently share their stories about meeting and failing to meet goal in their own spaces. You can click on any of the hyperlinks to visit their content and sites.

Ryan and Selena Fredrick, Fierce Marriage and Fierce Men. You can follow them together on Facebook and Instagram. Ryan is a great X follow and posts banger content. One of my inspirations for this post was Ryan’s recent Fierce Men video on creating a family vision. That’ll be posted in the Below Deck: A Deep Dive section of this newsletter.

Matthew Majeika, a brother and friend I met through X. Not only has he been an encourager who reached out to me and prayed for me, he consistently posts about his weight training goals and progress with insights to how he built his own gym. Definitely a recommend if you have an X account.

Alex Barrera, another brother and friend from X, is known for the weekly Sunday Night Fill Up posts, where he shares about how loving your wife means showing up for her and providing a practical, stable, loving presence through filling up her van’s gas tank on Sunday so she doesn’t have to worry about it through the week.

Kristin McTiernan, Fictional Influence, Black Market Fiction digital magazine, YouTube and X. She’s not always safe, but what makes her one of my favorite content creators is her willingness to confront the ugly truth where we least want to see it - in the mirror. A perfect example is the New Years Day article on her Substack, Confessions of a Fat F*ck. Talk about scroll stopping titles. I know that’s a title that doesn’t fit with what I normally share here, but her brutal self-assessment and effort to know thyself is the big takeaway and reason I’m sharing it. Her “why” for change is good, too, and will actually fit very well into what’s coming for this newsletter in February.

Michael Easter, TwoPercent newsletter YouTube and X, is an author I wanted to mention specifically for his book Scarcity Brain. As someone who struggles with impulse control and an itchy trigger finger for buying things online and the punchline of a long family joke of being the kid who used the reasoning “but it’s the last one!” to justify having to have it, Michael Easter gets to the root of how companies have implemented science and behavior studies from casinos to maximize hooking consumers on their products and getting them to pull the “Add to Cart” lever one more time.

Last but absolutely not least, Brett McKaye at The Art of Manliness. Over the years, AoM has been a massive help to practical wisdom and guidance and goal setting when it comes to all things masculine. It’d be an absolute miss to not mention them here. AoM is quite literally the best site on the internet and has been a role model for how I write Fightin’ Poseidon. In the heart of 2020’s furloughs, I I joined and participated in The Strenuous Life (Class 049), which kickstarted me getting out of some real debilitating patterns. I still have a ways to go but I wouldn’t be where I am without AoM and TSL. With hundreds of podcast episodes and thousands of articles, it can be daunting to find content there, but let me share two of the most impactful articles I’ve read from AoM. Practical Wisdom: The Master Value, Via Negativa: Adding to Your Life by Subtracting, and Get More Done With the Rule of 3.

Dropping Anchor

This is all good in theory and words, but we without action, all the theory and words amount to nothing. Instead of saying what you’re going to do, just do it. Unless you want accountability to help you stay on track, let the only ones who know about your goal(s) be God and your notebook.

Especially if you’ve been big on how “this time it’s going to be different,” after you’ve said it ten times. That’s something I’ve been guilty of, and it takes a lot to overcome that kind of behavior.

I thrive on structure and without it, I massively flounder on getting started, progress, and building momentum. I try to be honest here that I don’t have it all figured out. As I said above, one of my failures was defining success not by my actions but on the fragile buy in of others. The catch-22 of this is that without working towards my own action and vision and momentum, it’s difficult for anyone to see that direction and join me. That’s a tough pill to swallow but it is what it is and I hope by sharing it here, someone will benefit from it.

I’ve failed with goals many times. I’ve experienced both sides of that coin, success and failure. That’s why I want to give these tools to you as ways you can bolster your own goals, instead of telling you how you need to change your life to meet my goals. I don’t know what your goals are for 2026, but I hope you’re able to make traction with them.

It’s always hardest to get started. Once you build momentum, it’s easier to keep going.

May the Lord bless you and keep you and may His face shine upon you and your families and friends and anyone else around you this year. May you abide in the love of God displayed on the cross and find your identity in Him, regardless of how well you do or don’t keep your resolutions. May your relationships be healed to the glory of God and the good of everyone involved.

Thanks for reading. There’s a lot of good stuff in the pipeline already written and ready for your inboxes this year. Thanks for taking the journey with me.

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

Below Deck: A Deep Dive

I mentioned Ryan earlier in Sunbreak Stories. I love the work he’s doing with Fierce Men because he’s approaching historic in a way that resonates with how I write these newsletters. Not every family is going to match a guru or influencer’s 12 steps to success because every family and situation is dynamic. There’s no excuses there, but it means generic advice toward the specific ends don’t typically fit the situational and circumstantial mold each individual man finds himself in. That can lead to frustration. It has for me.

Ryan is sharing timeless wisdom that is adaptable to each man wherever he’s at, and that’s why I find his content so compelling. Everyone’s writing about goals right now. I’m the video, he references a link to a free PDF he has available you can use to craft a family vision. I already have downloaded and will be working on it this month.