If you happen to follow us on Instagram (Cheyenne on IG; Geoff on IG), you might know that Geoff and I skipped town on New Years Day for a little rest, a little adventure and a lot of planning for the year ahead.  We took two days/one night away in Asheville, North Carolina and truly had the best time.  It was such a good time that I think we shall make this a yearly tradition!  For added fun, we decided to take ourselves on a “Coffee Crawl” through downtown and west Asheville for the various phases of our planning time.  We managed to make it through 8 stops on our crawl in the time we were there; the first day we made it to these three:

1) Double D’s Coffee and Dessert

2) Dobra Tea

3) Old Europe

Such fun.  🙂

Anyway, I shared a little bit of our planning process on Instagram, but promised a recap, as well as the sharing of the goals that we landed on (for business, I’ll do this).

We chose to separate our family/personal life goals from our business goals.  Since our business goal setting is a much more intensive process, we began with planning for what we wanted our family life to look like this year.  As a kickoff for our planning time, we used Emily Ley’s free printable – “New Years Family Meeting” as a guide for discussion.  We took some time to complete the following sections:

1) What worked for our family last year?

2) What didn’t work for our family last year?

3) Changes ahead for our family next year:

4) Memories we’d love to make next year:

Looking back at what our life was like last year, as well as getting the wheels turning for next year, was a great exercise before we moved forward.  When it was time to set our family/personal goals for 2015, we considered the following categories and set goals for each section:

Health (how we want to eat, exercise and sleep, etc.)

Travel/Recreation (Trips we want to take (both family and just the two of us), experiences/activities we want to do with the kids)

Finances (plans for budgeting, spending, saving, giving and paying down debt)

House (basically a punch list for home improvement)

Relationships (Marriage – date nights, schedule/limitations for work nights; Kids – monthly calendar of outings/activities, individual kid dates; Friends)

Spiritual (daily connecting with God personally, prayer/discussion in our marriage, etc.)

Cheyenne / Geoff (individual personal goals…for me it’s books to read, continuing to co-lead my ladies e-group, shooting more family pictures with “the good camera”)

I’ll share a couple of my favorite goals from each section:

+ Sleep – bedtime is midnight at the very latest (Health)

+ Sign Boone up for Tee Ball in the spring (Travel/Recreation)

+ Make seasonal bucket lists for activities we want to do as a family (Travel/Recreation)

+ Make a substantial dent in my last student loan (Finances)

+ Print and hang pictures in our living room (House)

+ Incorporate more fun into our monthly date night out…like going canoeing! (Relationship)

+ Separately take each individual kid on a special date/outing once/month (Relationship)

+ Have the Lannings over for brunch…happening next week! (Relationship)

+ Debrief Sunday church sermon together at our Sunday night meetings (Spiritual)

Stay tuned in a separate post for the “how” we plan to make these things happen.

Our other main motivation in getting away for these days was to spend some intentional quiet time each day to really seek the Lord and ask Him what it was that He wanted for us in 2015…for our family and our business.  Our time at Dobra Tea (pictured above) on the first day of our trip was spent reading our bibles, praying, journaling, listening and asking Him to align our desires for our lives with His.

Check back Monday for Part Two – a peek into how we went about planning for our business in the coming year.