Setting and reviewing goals does not have to be hard. In this episode, I’m going to explore a really easy way to do a mid-year goals review, so that you can get back on track with anything that you dreamed about and planned back in January, or indeed any time. I’ll also talk about how my own goals are going for the year, and how I’m re-planning goals that I set 6 months ago.

If you haven’t set goals or you want some help setting goals because it has felt difficult in the past, I also have something for you in this episode. The number one thing I want you to know is that setting and achieving goals can be a clear process, when you know how. I’m not saying all goals are easy to achieve, but I know that when you focus on them in the right way, then those meaningful things are much easier to make real in your life.

Listen to the episode!

Listen on Spotify or Listen on Apple Podcasts

So June is the perfect time for a mid-year goal check in. I actually like to review my goals every month, so that I can tweak things and make new plans if I need to, before I steer right off course. So you can take this process anytime of the month, or of the year, and take a look at if you are achieving your goals. It’s much less about when you review your goals, and much more about committing to a really short period of time to sit down and intentionally decide what you want and how you’re going to get there.

If you have already have one or more goals set, I want to share with you now 2 things that are really important to think about when reviewing them. All you need to do is sit down with a pen and notebook, or your phone, really for only about 10 mins, and go through this process.

And if you’re not quite up to this step yet and haven’t set any goals, I have a few things for you. I have a few podcast episodes on setting goals, so if you want to read the blog posts of those, the first is here, the second is here, and the third is here! These three posts cover some things that you might like to think about when setting big but achievable goals.

But more importantly, I have a free goal-setting workshop for you that you can sign up for now which takes you through my exact process of setting goals that is based in research and actually works with your brain, so you can finally achieve those goals rather than just having them sit in a drawer somewhere. I know goal setting can feel like this big impossible task sometimes, like it might even be futile, but I promise you by the end of that workshop you’ll have set meaningful goals and have a real plan on exactly how to incorporate them into your lifestyle. Sign up and then take it any time you like, and you’ll really be able to make changes to your life.

Your First Mid-Year Goals Review Question

So diving in now to the first thing you need to ask yourself when reviewing your goals is whether this goal still matters to you. Is this still a priority? How much of a priority is it, compared with other things? Think about all the other things you have going on in your life, and decide if this is still something you want to spend your time on. If it is, then you might like to write down what level of priority this is for you. Is this top level most important kinda stuff, or is this something that you’d just like to be doing every now and them?

If this goal is not a priority for you anymore, then that’s ok, you don’t have to keep it on your list or in your mind. You could change it a little or make it a lower priority, that’s ok too.

It really helps to also write down why it’s a priority for you. Why is this important? This helps you to really find that inspiration and motivation to keep going with working towards this goal. It helps you feel energised towards spending the time on the actions that it will take to achieve that really important goal in your heart. So write that down as well.

Your Second Goal-Review Question

Once you’ve done that for each of your goals, you can move on to the second thing I want you to consider. And that is: Has your method of working towards this goal worked for you so far?

If you set this goal before now, which you have because that’s why you’re reviewing it, then chances are you’ve tried to achieve it already. Maybe you did part of it, or maybe you did something once one time, and for some reason you didn’t continue. What is that reason? Why have you not achieved this already? And this isn’t a dig at yourself, you can ask this with curiosity and so much compassion, and be like a detective and really investigate what is going on here.

Maybe you got bored, maybe it was too hard, maybe you didn’t find time – but remember, you don’t find time, you make time, and you’ll actually learn about that in the free goal-setting workshop. What is it exactly that has or has not worked so far. Do you need to do something more often or less often? Do you need more help or supplies or knowledge? Look at your mindset? Maybe something genuinely got in the way and you just need to adjust the timeline. If you are stuck here on this question and not sure why you haven’t taken the actions towards this yet, then it might help you to read about how to beat procrastination.

It might be that you need to be a little bit more aware about what you’re doing and how much time you are spending on things. I’m going to talk about the brain for a second here. Part of your brain’s process of acting effectively in the world, what we call executive functions, is actually a process where we have to check that what we’re doing is appropriate for the situation. This is called self-monitoring, and we know that one part of planning is actually self-monitoring, so in practice this looks like you being aware of what you’re doing, and then checking-in to see if what you’re doing is relevant, and is effective. This is a skill your brain does. So let’s use this skill.

Check what you’re doing, notice, track it if you want to, you might like to track your actions for a week or two to see how much of something you’re actually doing, and then decide if you’re happy with that, and if it’s working for you. Then with this information, you can change it if you need to.

Once you have an idea of why your process hasn’t worked for you in achieving this goal so far, then you can change it. Make a new plan by coming up with some new ideas about exactly how you can execute this, and then write it down so that you can start making meaningful progress.

My Own Mid-Year Goals Review!

So I used these two questions to review my own goals that I set at the start of the year. You might have heard me talk in a previous episode about how I had some different areas that I wanted to focus on, and then I allocated different months of the year to different projects.

I had a goal to increase the amount of exercise I was doing, and this was an ongoing thing, and then for the projects that I wanted to complete, I allocated one to each month between January and September. I didn’t do the whole year, I only did the first 9 months, because it’s much too hard to plan in the longer term, and also, I knew that there would likely be some changes to those later months because of other priorities that come up in the year that you just can’t foresee.

So what actually happened was that this year there were about 4 or 5 really difficult challenges that I had that not only took up a huge chunk of time, so much so that I didn’t really work much in April, but also they were very upsetting for me and it was hard to focus on work and other projects even when I did have pockets of time. So this meant that the plan that I had to achieve those goals didn’t really stick to the timeline that I had allocated.

I think that even though we all have interruptions, we can make achievable plans when we include some buffer time, but this really has been a very unusual year for me in terms of unexpected events so the plans really did get pushed out quite a lot, and that’s ok, I can still have those goals and it doesn’t mean I don’t set goals or make plans, because then I wouldn’t be bringing more joy and fulfillment in my life and those things are important to me.

I Wanted to Exercise Better

So something I really wanted to improve was exercise and weight loss. This was a goal for me where the plan to do that looks like ongoing changes to my lifestyle, as opposed to a one-off project like some of my other goals. So I took this goal and put it through my two goal review questions.

Is exercising harder and losing weight still a priority for me? And the answer was yes. This is still a huge priority for me, probably one of the most important things in my life, so I do want to keep it as a goal, and keep including the associated activities as part of my lifestyle.

If I think about my why, there are so many reasons why I want to do this, I’m in my 40s and I want to feel strong, and keep feeling strong into the future, I want to be healthy for my own longevity and for my kids as well, I have quite a few ongoing…not injuries…but very temperamental sore spots since I was pregnant with Ruby and postnatally as well, and I know that when I exercise I’m much less sore, and I also want to look and feel fit. So going through this process reminded me of how important this goal was.

So the second question for this goal was has the method of achieving it so far worked? Now, with goals like this where the plan to enact it is an ongoing change, it can be hard to tick it off a list to say yep – I’ve achieved that. You don’t ever complete exercise, so the bar here is a few different things, it’s am I losing the weight I put on during the pregnancy, it’s am I feeling fit and less sore, and am I doing exercise as frequently as I want to be, things like that. And these are only things that I can decide, the goal weight and the goal number of times to exercise per week, and how I’m feeling, all those are measures of success that only I can decide.

So the question becomes, am I happy with what I’m doing to have this goal or big idea of being fit, in my life? For me, I have increased the frequency of exercise, so last year when I still felt very postnatal and was doing more gentle exercise, I probably only did it 2-3 times per week, whereas now my goal is 4 times per week, and I am lifting heavier weights now.

So I’m happy with that, but I do still find that there are weeks when I don’t do that. And so the answer to my question of why I’m not incorporating this is really a mindset problem, around telling myself that I don’t have time – the fact is that I do have time but it’s a matter of whether I’m allocating time to my priorities. But there are only so many hours in the day, and I have to feel satisfied with how many hours I’m spending on things like exercise and work and time with the kids, vs other things like TV that are not a priority.

So to address this I’ve had to really be honest with myself and make exercise a higher priority, and actually say that to myself when the time comes around, because exercise feels hard sometimes, and so it’s easy to go oh well, I’ll just sit on the floor while Ruby plays, when what I need to be doing is saying to myself something like, I’m going to exercise because it feels good and it’s important to me.

To make it feel easier, I have set up a specific routine so that after Ruby’s morning tea, I exercise l. And that gets rid of the mental decision making of oh, when should I exercise, how am I going to fit it in, should I exercise, I don’t feel like doing it today. So you can see here that I’ve really looked at my plan from a few different perspectives and make changes to how I’m actually going about the activities that I need to do to get to my goal.

Specific Project Goals

So that is my own personal example of a goal that is an ongoing process, but I also have quite a few single projects that I wanted to do this year, so I can take those goals and put them through the two questions as well. I had quite a few art-related projects this year that I decided I would do in different months, so I planned to paint a canvas in February, hang family pictures on the wall in March, and make some frames of baby items in May, and I had other things for all the other months too.

But as the year went on I ended up having less time than I thought I would, and so two things happened – I decided that my number one priority of those things would be painting the canvas and so I did that, but I didn’t complete it and hang it until the end of April. And the other thing that happened was that I decided that a different goal was more important to me, and I wanted to spend my time doing that instead, which was decluttering. So in May I spent my time going through the baby clothes and the kids clothes and some other items to donate and sell etc. So I rearranged my plan as I went.

And now that it’s mid year, and I’m reviewing my goals, I looked at those projects and I asked myself the first question – are they still important – and the answer is yes, but decluttering is also important and so I’ve reallocated those projects to different months going forward for the second half of the year, and incorporated more decluttering jobs.

And the second question about whether my plan is working, has me thinking about the preparation I need to do some of these tasks. For example, with hanging the picture frames, this is something we’ve put off a lot since moving in to this house two years ago, because I feel like I get to the weekend when I want to hang them, but we either haven’t decided what to put where, or we don’t have the right hooks for it so it just feels like it will take too long for the time that I have allocated, and so in previous years I just haven’t done it at all. So going forward, I’m going to put some action steps into the calendar that focus on the preparation for some of these projects.

So my new plan for my projects is to hang the pictures in June, declutter the study in July, work on a photobook that I want to create in August, and I’ve moved the baby frames to October. And to execute this, I want to do the projects on Sundays, but I’m going to spend a bit of time on a weekday evening preparing for these tasks.

Now It’s Time to Review Your Own Goals

So I’ve talked a little bit about goals, executing plans, and preparation, and if you want to learn exactly how to apply all this to your own big goals I’d encourage you again to get access to my free goal-setting workshop, it’s called Big Goals for Busy Brains, it’s less than 25 minutes, and you’ll walk away with a clear plan on how to go after both one-off projects, and goals that require ongoing activity as well.

I hope I have encouraged you to do a review of your goals whether it’s the middle of the year or not, and with these two questions it should be a really easy process for you. Let’s end with my favourite quote, it’s by Mary Oliver, “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.