With spring upon us, we inherently gravitate towards spring cleaning our physical spaces. Many of us are looking to revamp and redecorate our homes and gardens as we feel energised by the new season.
It also feels like a great time to take stock of the year by doing a mid-year review. Revisit our goals and progress so far. This is immensely important as we lose focus and go through the year rather than maintain the same direction and intentionality we started with in January.
“Our goals are only as good as the daily habits we can develop and practice in achieving these goals. Just setting goals in January doesn’t mean you will achieve them.”
By losing focus, we miss opportunities right in front of us, and we start to neglect the important relationships around us and the support they can offer in achieving our goals.
So how do you refocus your minds on goals you might have forgotten because you set them back in January, and life just got hectic.
Are you still on track working and living intentionality towards our goals?
How do we re-energise ourselves?
Here are three questions to help you make the last half of your year even better than the first half.
What were your top achievements from the first half of the year?
Start each month and quarter by celebrating your top 3 achievements from the year’s first half. Reviewing my past actions reminds me to celebrate my achievements from the prior month. Starting my months and days reminding myself of my past wins, no matter how small, makes me feel confident and even more motivated because I can see my progress. As always, the focus should be on progress over perfectionism
How did you achieve them?
What motivated you to keep working towards these goals even when the going got tough? Whenever I pursue any big goal, I always try to identify the things and reasons why this goal is essential to me at the very beginning of the process. This stops me from quitting further down the line. In writing the book Unstoppable Women, there were many moments when I wanted to quit and shelve the book because it was taking a lot longer than planned. I had a lot of support in writing the book, but it also needed a lot of my input. I was going through a hectic period of my life, travelling for work, moving house, the pandemic, getting sick with covid and finally losing my mother! I had every reason to quit, but I couldn’t quit because I had written that I was finishing and publishing the book in my Goal Achiever planner. I’m not in the habit of breaking promises I made to myself or the 26 other women featured in the book.
What lesson have you learnt about yourself in pursuit of these goals?
Every pain and failure is an opportunity for deep, meaningful reflections. As they say, we don’t learn as much from our success as we learn from our failures. Making the time to identify the lessons learnt when things don’t go exactly to plan will help us make better progress next time. Write down those reflections and lessons learnt and use them as a foundation for your next big goal. I find that I very conveniently forget a lot of my mistakes! This selective amnesia makes it easier to repeat these same mistakes unless I document them somewhere. To ensure growth, I must learn from my mistakes.
GET FOCUSED FOR the next half of the year.
Now is the time to take charge of your goals and effectively your life. Don’t just wait for things to happen to you. Make things happen for yourself.
These questions are from the Goal Achiever Planner. Grab your 6-month cycle, non-dated planners and get back on track for achieving your goals this year.