It’s June already and as we settle into the 6th month of the year, it’s time to regroup and reassess our 2018 goals.
I highly recommend doing a quick check in with your goals every month, but even if you’ve been doing this, it’s really important to do a thorough overview before you head into the second half of the year.
Checking in will help you to understand what’s worked well, what hasn’t, what needs changing or removing or adding.
After all, we can’t improve what we don’t understand, and if making each day better than the last is high on your list of priorities then you’ll want to understand what’s been going on since you set your goals back in January.
Grab a note pad and a pen, your favourite beverage and your 2018 goals list or vision board (whatever you used to record your goals/dreams at the beginning of the year).
Now:
- Go through your list and tick any goals that have been achieved. CELEBRATE THESE!!
- Go through it again and circle any that you feel are well in hand and set to be achieved within the next 6 months without any changes to what you’re currently doing.
- Then go through and pull out each goal that you feel you’re still a long way from achieving. Write them down on a page of your notepad.
- One by one, think through each of these yet-to-be-achieved goals and ask if they are still important to you. If not, cross them out. If so, write each one out again at the top of its own piece of paper.
And now for the fun part…
Under each of these goals, you’re going to put a completion date, followed by a list of all the tasks you need to undertake in order to achieve that goal by that date.
Then you’re going to schedule all those tasks!
Simple, right!?
Wrong!
This is where we often come unstuck. We’re great at setting goals and dreaming dreams. Not so good at doing the work.
But this is your life, and if you’re not willing to put in the work, perhaps you don’t really want that thing anyway?
Or perhaps it’s just time to up the ante.
What’s your one, huge, too-crazy-to-say-out-loud goal for the next 12-18 months?
THAT is what you need to start working on today – literally scheduling in the tasks for it TODAY. Because as you know, life happens and time flies and it will be December 2019 before you know it and you won’t have even written this goal down!
Our big medium-term family dream is to travel around New Zealand for a month at the end of next year. My Mum’s family is from NZ and we’ll be coinciding it with a family reunion.
While this is still 18 months away and a lot can happen in 18 months, I also know that it will be upon us before we know it (sorry for all the clichés today!), so this week I’ve started researching where we want to go.
As we homeschool, I’m doing this research with the kids so that they can have an active role in understanding international travel, creating the itinerary, planning the budget and designing our family adventure.
Once we have an itinerary sorted, then we can research travel and accommodation options and the plan is to have these booked and paid for before the end of this year. Oh, for an 8 berth campervan option!
When we were first looking to do this trip, it was pretty intimidating to think about the logistics of taking 8 people to another country for an entire month, even if it is an English-speaking country that wakes up only a few hours before us! But breaking it down into specific task groups and then putting completion dates next to those tasks has eased the mental burden significantly.
It’s meant that there’s no point “borrowing trouble” from tomorrow in terms of planning. I don’t need to worry about trawling hire car sites right now because we’re not up to that yet, and when we are, I’ll be ready to it.
One day at a time, or in this case: one task at a time.
This method of breaking a goal down into various tasks applies whether your goal is related to health, fitness, financial, travel, family, marriage, business, spiritual, professional/personal development… or even just one very specific project.
Remember, goals aren’t there to taunt us. They’re not designed to make us feel inadequate or inept. We choose them, write them down and say them out loud to create a driving focus for our life.
You want to give yourself the best chance possible of achieving your goals, so schedule a time within the next week to sit down (preferably with your spouse so that you’re both on the same page and can work on family goals at the same time) and go through what will guide your decisions during the second half of 2018.
Go get it!
Share with me in the comments: what was your one big goals win so far this year? Don’t forget to celebrate the wins!
