Believe it or not, it’s time to start goal setting for 2027. I know, I know — you just got 2026 figured out. But stick with me for a minute.
You’ve probably heard someone say “next year is going to be my year.” Maybe you’ve even said it yourself, somewhere around December 30th, riding a wave of eggnog-fueled optimism. It’s usually followed by a New Year’s resolution that lasts until roughly February 3rd, at which point the gym membership quietly becomes a monthly donation to a treadmill you’ll never touch again.
I was scrolling a stock photo site the other day and stumbled across an image captioned “Next Year Was Better.” I have no idea what inspired whoever wrote that, but I’m glad they did, because it resonated with me.
That single shift in tense, “was” instead of “will be,” changes everything about how goal setting for 2027 should actually work.
Goal Setting for 2027 Starts With a Verb Tense
I’ve been reading about visualization lately. Not the manifest-it-into-existence, vision-board-and-hope variety. I’m talking about the kind where you picture yourself having already achieved the thing, so your brain knows what it’s actually working toward.
Here’s why that matters. If you’ve never seen yourself succeed at something, your brain doesn’t have a template for it. It’s like reciting a speech you’ve never practiced. You know the general idea, but the words come out clunky the moment it counts.
I watched this play out constantly across two-plus decades of nonprofit fundraising conferences. Trainers would tell major gift officers to visualize themselves asking a donor for half a million dollars. Not just picture it vaguely, but actually rehearse saying the words out loud, so brain and mouth are working as a team when the real ask happens.
If the biggest number you’ve ever said out loud to a donor is ten thousand dollars, your mouth will not casually produce “half a million” without some practice first. It stutters. It second-guesses. It comes out sounding like “ten… no, fifty… um.”
Your goals for next year work the same way. If this year was rough, or just quietly forgettable, jumping straight to “best year ever” is the equivalent of going from a ten-thousand-dollar ask to a half-million-dollar ask with zero rehearsal. It’s not that you can’t get there. It’s that you can’t get there in one leap without practice.
Small Swings Beat Big Overhauls
This is where a lot of resolutions fall apart. We try to overhaul everything at once — career, health, relationships, that closet you’ve been “organizing” since 2019 — and the sheer size of the vision makes it impossible to actually visualize, let alone achieve.
Instead, ask yourself one honest question: what’s the one thing that could genuinely move the needle in 2027, for your job, your personal life, or your purpose-driven work? Not ten things. Not a full life reboot. One thing, maybe two.
Then start picturing what it feels like to have already done it. Not the doing part — the having done part. What does it feel like next December, looking back and knowing 2027 was better?
I’ll admit, that’s a strange way to talk about the future. Most of us are trained to describe goals in the future tense, like we’re placing an order and waiting for it to arrive. But ordering isn’t the same as building. And “will be better” leaves a lot of room for excuses to sneak in between now and then.
“Was better” assumes the work already happened. It’s a small mental trick, but it puts you on the other side of the finish line looking back, instead of standing at the starting line feeling overwhelmed by the distance ahead.
Next week, I’ll walk through some things you can start doing right now to actually prepare for setting your 2027 goals, so this isn’t just a visualization exercise but the beginning of a real plan.
For now, just sit with the feeling for a minute. Imagine it’s next December. What does it feel like to say, out loud and with confidence, that next year was better?
You can make that true. Let’s start planning for it, one honest, well-rehearsed goal at a time.
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