Get Your Goals Done With this Mid-Year Check-In

Goal setting is essential to living a life with purpose and meaning. Goals give our lives direction and focus, and help us stay motivated.

Nearly everything in life revolves around goals, they encompass all of our plans for the future, all of our hopes, dreams and visions for what we want in life. And yet we often fail to reach our goals. That’s because we’re all human and can be easily distracted.

Avoid the Mid-Year Slump

Maybe you’ve been powering through and are making great progress toward your goals. If so, that’s great! Take a look back and enjoy seeing what you’ve accomplished. At this point, the danger is letting complacency set in. You want to keep moving forward and avoid that mid-year slump that can derail your progress for the remaining half of the year.

Check In to Reach Your Goals

Checking in on your goals might show you progress you didn’t know you’d made, that’s always encouraging. Checking in can also give you some insight about how you need to change your goals.

How to Check In

Go back to your goal list (if you’re pursuing more than one) or your goal description.

Ask yourself, where did I start? Where am I now? The point is not to berate yourself, it’s to accurately assess your rate of progress, the obstacles encountered, and to determine how you can keep going and even improve for the rest of the year.

Set some markers for progress, one every two to four weeks, and check in when you reach each marker. A little at a time adds up to a lot, and you’ve got five more months in this year to get things done.

Evaluating

Evaluating your progress is like drawing up a roadmap for the year. You can’t get back on track if you don’t even know where the track is or if it leads to where you want to go.

Have you ever set a goal at the beginning of the year only to realize you don’t care about it just a few months later?

That’s why evaluating your progress isn’t just about making sure you’re working hard on your goals, it’s about making sure your goals still work for you.

Ask yourself why you want to accomplish each goal. If you don’t have a good enough answer, it’s time to say goodbye.

What are my achievements?
What are my struggles?
What is the next step?

Using these three questions to work your way through your goals for the rest of the year, really gives you the opportunity for a reset. I urge you to physically write the answers to these questions down, and not just think of the answers, you will find if you can be honest with yourself and write out your struggles, you will be more likely to pinpoint the steps needed to achieve your goals.

It is important to not get defeated at this point. If there is a goal on your list that you haven’t even began to work towards, don’t put yourself down for it. Break the goal down into smaller, tangible goals. Try to give yourself the grace you would give to someone else.