This week has not been typical. And not in the flying-on-a-jet-plane somewhere kind of way. Instead, this week my feet stayed firmly grounded in Argentina, but just on different ground.

Here’s the story:

Every year I try to put aside two days to do a personal goal-setting retreat. I believe that setting annual goals is essential, and this is the time I take to review the year behind me and plan for the year ahead. My only real deliverable at the end of the retreat is is to have, written out in the front of my new Moleskine journal that will serve me in the year to come, my fancy new list of goals.

So this week I retreated to a lovely apartment in a lovely apartment building that my husband built in the middle of busy Buenos Aires and did me some goal-setting.

Importantly, I did three things that made it work, and three things I pretty much swear by when it comes to annual goal setting. (You can see my talk about these three things with some particularly hideous hair going on in this Periscope video, where I also show you how far my husband fell while sleep walking and how it’s pretty amazing he wasn’t hurt.)

  1. First things first, I didn’t do my other work. It’s easy when given the liberty of a day or two solo to just use it catch up on your other work, or, heaven forbid, try to spend the time to clean out your email inbox. Don’t fall into this temptation. This retreat is for your goals, not for inbox zero.
  2. Secondly, I disconnected. It was super important for me to get offline as much as possible during the retreat. Although I did end up using my computer (and some internet connection as I did some stuff in Google Sheets), I kept it to that.
  3. Third, I dreamed big. Although goals aren’t dreams, in order to figure out what your goals are you have to start with your dreams, and work from there. Dream big, and find your way to your goals through those dreams.

All in all, it was an awesome experience, and I finished my goal-setting retreat by getting blood taken, listening to a podcast about Iceland, and buying nine Christmas presents (in that order).

If goal-setting is your thing, or you think it should be, learn about how to set goals by checking out one of the great FREE webinars that Michael Hyatt is putting on TODAY. (Yes, today.) Michael has taught me immensely about how to create and achieve my goals, and I couldn’t recommend his work more highly.

Check out the webinars here.