How often do you take the time out to really reflect on how you are progressing towards your goals for the year?
Now that we are at the half-way point of the year, it’s the perfect time to conduct your own personal mid-year review!
Why Conduct a Personal Mid-Year Review?
Conducting a mid-year review gives you the time and space necessary to evaluate your progress towards your goals.
Without taking the time out to reflect, how do you know whether your decisions, behaviour and actions for the first 6 months have helped you move towards where you want to go in your life?
Reflection is one of the most fundamental skill-sets of successful people.
If you are serious about creating your best life and making your dreams a reality, then you need to reflect to ensure you are making the right decisions and working towards them in the most effective and efficient way.
Benefits of Conducting a Personal Mid-Year Review
There are a tonne of benefits from conducting your own mid-year review.
Some of the major benefits include:
- Determine if your actions are progressing you towards your goals
- Determine if you are progressing at the right speed (i.e. will you reach your goal on time?)
- Determine if your goals are still relevant
- Understand the challenges you have faced and what learning’s you can make
- Identify more effective or efficient methods of achieving your goal
The more often you can conduct a personal review, the more effective you will become in your life.
I would recommend that you at least do a 6-monthly in-depth review of your goals. In fact, I encourage you to do it as often as you can. When I talk about these reviews, I’m talking about your ‘big life goals’.
Conducting Your Personal Mid-Year Review
Let me guide you through the process that I go through when I conduct my own personal reviews.
It is a process whereby I ask myself specific questions which help me understand exactly what I can do moving forward to work more effectively and efficiently towards my goals.
Get Yourself Setup
Before we get to the questions, the first thing you need to do is get yourself ready for your mid-year review. No, this doesn’t mean you have to dress up nicely and look pretty, it simply means you need to get yourself in an environment that is conducive for reflection.
So, to get setup:
Find yourself a nice, quiet environment
Have your goals and any other supporting materials with you that you can use to look over
Make sure you have something to write with
One piece of advice on the environment… try conducting your mid-year review away from your ‘normal’ working environment. This would mean getting out of the office, or away from your home and out into a park or somewhere where you can think about your life more objectively and freely.
Let’s get into it!
Question 1: Are My Goals Still Relevant?
Goals change over time. Life is full of surprises!
This is not something to be concerned about, but something to be aware of.
The first thing to do when conducting your personal mid-year review is to look over the goals that you have set and ask yourself whether they are still relevant.
How have your goals changed?
Sometimes when you originally set your goals the future is murky. It’s impossible to predict the future and to know with 100% certainty that a set of circumstances will eventuate. In-line with this, you may have had some clarity on the general direction of where you want to go, but now that you are six months into the year you have realised that there is a slight alternative that you are now working towards.
This is fine and goals are to be constantly tweaked and refined… this is all part of the process!
The key is to ensure that your goals are still linked to the things that you are passionate about.Passion creates the drive, energy and enthusiasm necessary for success.
When looking over your goals, it’s also good to remind yourself of WHY you are working towards them. Your goals and your life need meaning. Answering the question of why will reinvigorate the drive for making them a reality.
Question 2: What have I achieved?
Do you fall victim to ‘setting and forgetting’ your goals? Hopefully not now that you’re part of The Start of Happiness!
Now that you have confirmed that your goals are still relevant, the next step in the process is to reflect on what you have actually achieved.
How are you tracking towards your goals? What ‘mini-goals’ have you met or what smaller steps have you done to help you reach where you are?
Taking the time to reflect on what you have achieved will help you to determine whether your actions and progressing you towards your goals and whether you are likely to achieve them on time.
One of the best things about asking yourself this question is that it will highlight the behaviours and actions that have worked. This is super-important to being able to progress further in the back half of the year.
Question 3: What challenges have I faced?
When you are looking back over your progress for the year, it’s important that you also look at the challenges you have faced.
Very rarely can you reach your most important goals without a challenge being thrown your way.
Reflect on what these challenges have been. Why did these obstacles or challenges occur? How did you feel when they were presented? What did you do to overcome these challenges?
Resilience is a key factor in overcoming challenges. Understanding how you have faced these challenges and managed to overcome them helps you to build this resilience. It helps to embed the confidence in yourself that no matter what gets thrown your way you will be able to continue moving towards your goal.
The other thing that this question can raise is what can you do in the future to prevent these challenges from happening again?
Question 4: What have I learned?
Life is one big learning experience.
When you’re making progress towards your life goals you’re going to make a million decisions. Some good and some bad. One of the key ingredients that separates successful people is the ability to learn from their actions.
Looking back over your answers to the previous questions, now is the perfect time to ask yourself what have you learned from these experiences?
That is, what have you learned about your goals in life?
What have you learned from your achievements?
What have you learned from the challenges you have faced?
Taking the time to understand the key things that you have learned will help you get set-up perfectly for answering the next question.
Question 5: What can I do differently?
Now is when your mid-year review has its biggest impact. Your future.
Based on everything you have learned from answering the above questions, it’s time to think about the actions that you will put into place to make sure that the back half of the year is even more effective than the first half.
It’s all about continuous improvement! Never get complacent.
What habits do you need to change?
What extra support do you need?
What processes do you need to put in place to be more effective?
How will you address your next challenge?
This is a perfect opportunity for refining your goal and working on a specific strategy for the next 6 months of the year. You can start to map out the exact things you will do in this time to get you there.
Next Steps
There are 2 things you need to do first and foremost as next steps:
Set yourself a date for your next personal review
Write down 3 things that you can do immediately (or sometime today) to start building momentum in your life…. and go do them!
Your personal review should be a regular thing. If you can make it habitual then you’re well on your way to success.
I know of many people who write down their to-do lists or goals for a specific day, but how many people look at how those specific things on their to-do list help them progress towards their bigger goals in life?
The more regular you can review your progress towards your bigger, life goals, the more effective and the more speedy you will get there.
If you’re yet to create goals or want to go even a step back and start to look at the bigger picture in life (that is, understanding yourself and where exactly you want to go), then I highly recommend you check out our Launch Your Life Academy which guides you the proven process of making positive change in your life.
So, what are you waiting for?
Let’s make the next 6 months a ripper!
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