A how-to guide on setting and achieving goals for the year ahead, plus tips and tools to progress your performing career.
At the start of a new year, many of us feel a mounting pressure to reinvent, whether through a ‘New Year, New Me’ mindset or by setting unrealistic goals all while fighting against a lack of motivation during the winter months. Often, the difficulty with planning ahead for your performing career is the variables at play.
By getting organised, setting achievable goals and preparing in ways like creating a vision board, you can nurture your ambition.
1. Review Your Last Year
Setting goals for the year ahead by reflecting on what you achieved in your career last year is a great place to start. Taking the time to evaluate what went well and what didn’t quite work can help you identify what you can organise and prepare for this year.
Think about the year 2024 and write a list of positives and negatives about your career aspirations from last year. What went well for you? What do you want more of this year? What were some of the goals you wanted to achieve but didn’t? Can you identify whether external factors were at play or what – if anything – you could have done differently? Did you need more support to meet that goal?
Reviewing the past year is not about berating yourself, but rather understanding how you can adjust accordingly with a new perspective. There are often personal or financial issues at play which can affect our careers and it’s important to allow room for that. Be honest about how you felt in 2024 and if you want to change your goals, give yourself permission to do that. You can start over at any time.
If you’d prefer a more detailed way of reviewing the past year, Year Compass has a free booklet online that talks about closing last year and planning for the year ahead. There are sections on personal life, habits, goals you achieved in 2024, what you want to achieve in 2025 and how you would like to feel by the year’s end.
You can download a digital copy of the booklet or print it. Keep it somewhere safe and if you’d like to, you can read it at the end of the year to see how well you did.
2. Setting and Achieving Career Goals
Once you’ve reviewed your year, you can move ahead with writing a list of goals for 2025. Look at your list of positives and negatives from 2024 and write a list of new goals you want to achieve with these in mind.
For example, if one of your negatives is “I didn’t get as many theatre auditions as I wanted,” adapt it for 2025 into an actionable goal by adding smaller tasks like this:
Goal: Audition for more theatre in 2025
Actions:
- Research upcoming theatre roles and productions I would be right for.
- Create a list to send to my agent to enquire about.
- Create a list of casting directors to contact.
- Look into local productions.
- Read new plays.
Listing actions in this way will help you feel that achieving your goal is more manageable. Building onto positives is also important. Use the previous year’s achievements as motivation going forward and ask yourself: What have I already done that I can draw confidence from? Can I go further this year?
Next, you can list out your new goals. For example, one goal might be to start taking improv classes. Write that down, and underneath, start a small list of things to do that will help facilitate this goal like researching classes and starting a savings account to pay for the classes.
Add tasks to this list that you think will support your goal over a longer period of time.
By breaking down each goal in this way, you can start small and build up to the bigger goals and aspirations that you have throughout the year.
3. Start a Vision Board
A vision board is a collage of inspiring images and words that act as a visual representation of your goals. They can be literal or in relation to something you want to achieve or have. You can choose to create a vision board alone or make it a group activity and invite friends to join in.
The purpose of a vision board is to physically see your goals and aspirations as tangible. To do this, you can use an app like Freeform, Canva or Google Keep which allows you to add images, texts and shapes to a digital whiteboard. Or you can get hands-on, breaking out the arts and crafts box with cut-outs from magazines or newspapers and a glue stick.
Whichever method you choose, start off with a blank canvas and get yourself settled, making sure your environment is comfortable and facilitates creativity.
Steps to creating your vision board:
- Set your goals.
- Describe your goals in detail.
- Think about what images each goal conjures up in your mind and add them to your board. The images can be as specific or as abstract as you like, as long as you’re choosing pictures that mean something to you.
- Organise your board so it’s visually appealing and something you want to look at each day.
- Add words of affirmation, inspirational words or quotes that are important to you – anything that motivates you to reach your goal.
- Place your vision board where you can see it every day, like on your kitchen wall or display it as a screensaver on your phone or laptop.
Your board should hold meaning for you and remind you to stay motivated. Seeing your goals as achievable can help bestow self-belief and courage.
4. Organise Your Performer Admin
Organisation is a balancing act. Managing your time – while working multiple jobs outside of acting, keeping track of auditions, remembering when to cancel that free subscription and knowing what our inside leg measurement is – can be a struggle. How I stay organised and as prepared as possible is by creating and managing a database for anything related to performing.
You can start by creating a spreadsheet or using a fresh notebook to record all your acting admin. Include information like subscriptions, finances, contact details, measurements for castings, etc – anything that relates to acting. The idea is to make life easier through organisation. Keeping everything in one place saves time and energy – especially during busy times.
It’s helpful to create subheadings for everything you think you should include and then go back and add the information. For example, under the ‘My Memberships and Subscriptions’ subheading, I’ll record all of my acting-related memberships or subscriptions (like Spotlight), when they renew and how much they cost. Keeping track of this allows me to plan financially for yearly subscriptions and I know what to include in my expenses for tax purposes.
As performers know, building a network and knowing who you have relationships with is important, so it’s a good idea to keep a list of casting director contacts in your database. If there’s a production you want to be seen for, you can take a look in your own records at whether or not you have already been seen by that casting director for something else.
You should aim to update the acting admin database at least twice a year, to make sure it’s still useful and relevant for you.
5. Prioritise Your Goals
Identify three things you’d like to focus on overall throughout the year. Using your health, career and happiness as an example, write these three things on a Post-it note and consider what should take priority for you.
Anytime you feel overwhelmed, look at these three things on your Post-it notes. If what is overwhelming you or causing stress compromises your focus on these priorities, then take some time to regain focus and consider what is actually important.
Useful Tools
Tagmin
Tagmin is an important tool for actors, as well as agents. Updating your calendar is essential to ensure that you’re available for auditions or work where possible. You can also see when self-tapes are due, what dates to keep in mind if an audition comes in and try to look out for when the busier months are in a calendar year so that you can plan accordingly.
Update your profile if there are any changes to your measurements or special skills that your agents should know about.
Apps for Monologues and Self-tapes
Consider apps for acting to smooth out processes like self-taping and get familiar with them in your quieter times. ColdRead is great for learning lines in a short amount of time or recording lines for the reader if you can’t find one. It takes a while to understand how it works, but eventually, it can be used as a tool to make self-taping feel less of a burden – especially if there’s no option for an in-person audition.
BigVu is another app that has a built-in teleprompter. It allows you to create scripts to record, and you can adjust the speed and the placement to find the best eyeline. It’s especially useful for long texts or monologues. BigVu also allows you to retake if you aren’t happy – this way you don’t have a mass amount of takes to watch when you’re done.
Adapting Your Goals
This guide for organisation is designed to help you have a smoother year whilst working towards your goals. Organising your time, keeping track of acting admin and completing smaller tasks should allow you to manage your career more effectively. However, it’s important to remain malleable, as your goals may change throughout the year.
You may also find that some tools like vision boarding simply don’t work for you. It’s important to adapt as you navigate through the year. If you find it difficult to implement certain tools, try to find an alternative that works for you. Anything that’s causing a hindrance goes against what being organised and prepared is about.
Overall, you should consider what your ideal 2025 would look like and what you can do to facilitate that. If you find yourself feeling guilty for not upholding some of the goals you had in mind in the middle of the year, go back and adjust. Things will happen in life that can take us off course. This guide is a starting point for what might be useful, but ultimately, only you will know what actually helps your acting career seamlessly fit into your life.
The most important thing is to be kind to yourself, try to understand where the shortfall is coming from and how best to manage your time. Acting is a creative career with so much instability.
By using this guide effectively, you can start building stability with your own work ethic so you’re ready to take on the variables as and when they come.
You may also like:
- Five steps to set effective career goals
- Five things you can do to support a long-term acting career mindset
- Staying empowered throughout your acting career
Karen is a British actor of south Asian descent, born and raised in Birmingham, England. She is a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, New York. Most notably known for her role as Nicole Shelley in the award winning Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso starring opposite Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein and Nick Mohammed. She also played Noreen Khan in the first two seasons of the BBC television series Phoenix Rise.
In Theatre, Karen starred in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What at The English Theatre of Hamburg in Germany and performed opposite Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the original musical Me and the girls directed by Tony award winner Douglas Carter Beane. She has also played leading roles in regional premieres of David Harrower’s Blackbird and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things. In 2022 she was directed by Iqbal Khan in Mismatch at The Birmingham Rep as part of the Sky Comedy Rep Festival. Her other credits include lead roles in Camel written by Charly Clive, Welcome to Thebes, As you like it, Lysistrata, 4.48 Psychosis, The Tempest, Good Fit, She Kills Monsters, American As, Julius Caesar for The Public Theater at Shakespeare in the Park and Journey to America at the world famous Carnegie Hall, New York.
Karen’s selected work on film includes starring in The Waves for MTV Entertainment directed by BAFTA award winner Sindha Agha, Man on the Phone for Red Bear Films and Frank’s Plan for Amazon Prime. She has also appeared in commercials for Aramco, WhatsApp with Alex Scott, TK Maxx, West Midlands Combined Authority and Northwell Health Insurance in New York. She recently performed at the An Tain Arts Centre in Dundalk, Ireland in Why are you here? Directed by Paul Hayes.
Headshot credit: Andy Brown
