Can you believe we’re already half-way through the year?
Now is a great time to get reacquainted with your goals and review your progress over the past 6 months. A mid-year review is an opportunity to take stock of your wins, challenges, and lessons, while giving you the boost you need to get back on track with your goals.
Download your FREE Mid-Year Review Worksheet here! This in-depth worksheet walks you through 3 pages of reflection and growth, to help you finish this year on a high note.
(You can also follow along with our Yearly Planning Worksheets here and here.)
In this blog post, we'll go over the essential foundation questions at the heart of your mid-year review process. The tips and strategies below will help you renew your focus, gain clarity, and end the year on a high note.
What are things that went well?
Reflect on the past 6 months and make a list of things that went well. You can create a separate list for big wins and small wins, if you’d like. Make sure to include all the things you accomplished that were related to your goal.
This step is key to our goal development process because as human beings, we tend to inflate our mistakes and failures, while downplaying our victories and successes. Even if something doesn’t seem like a major accomplishment at first, write it down.
Try to see your accomplishments through the eyes of a friend or an outsider. They would probably be so impressed that you took an online class while managing to take care of your family. Or that you embarked on a new side gig during a challenging year.
Relish these wins. Write them down. Refer to them whenever you need an emotional boost.
What challenges or obstacles did you encounter?
Next, you’ll want to look back on the past 6 months and take note of any obstacles or unexpected hardships that you encountered.
You might find yourself dragging your heels on this part of the mid-year review--and you wouldn’t be alone. No one likes to see where they fell short on their goals or admit that things went wrong.
Try not to judge yourself doing this process and allow yourself to be honest. We’re only human beings, after all, and we are bound to slip up. And despite our best intentions, we are going to encounter events that thwart our goal setting process. Whether it’s an unexpected family crisis or unprecedented event, there will always be circumstances that are beyond our control.
The key thing is to be real about what happened and see what we can glean from that experience, so that we can move forward with our goals.
What did you learn?
Mid-year reviews are so illuminating because six months is a hefty chunk of time. You can cover a lot of ground in six months, so you’ll be able to gain real insights into your productivity, patterns, and habits.
I think a lot of people tend to skip this part of the mid-year review process. We make a list of things we accomplished and things we didn’t, then jump right into plotting the next set of goals. But it is crucial that we take the time to reflect on lessons learned and measure our progress.
As coach and writer Jane Scudder says: “Goals are amazing but unless our goals map to growth, we’re simply writing a to-do list.”
So instead of viewing your goals as a checklist, try to see them as a learning opportunity. Did you derive any lessons from your successes and failures? Did you identify any behaviors in your working style?
For instance, did you notice that you generated more wins when you were collaborating with a partner? Maybe this means that you tend to thrive when working in a group setting and that perhaps you should add a collaborative element to your goals. With this lesson learned, you could adjust your goal setting strategy to include an accountability partner as a way to maintain the spirit of collaboration.
Also, if you did not technically reach any goals, that doesn’t mean that the goal itself was a total failure. Let’s say your goal was to go for a run every week. Maybe you skipped some weeks, but maybe you also saw that you were running faster or building your endurance. This piece of knowledge can help motivate you to maintain this goal and stick with it.
Sadly, there will also be times when we measure our progress and see that we’ve made very little headway on our goal. If your goal was to meal prep every week but you never even got started, this could be a sign that maybe this goal isn’t a priority after all, or maybe you need to make adjustments with your process.
What do I want to focus on in the next 6 months?
After taking stock of your accomplishments, challenges, and lessons learned, it’s time to incorporate these reflections into the next 6 months.
Ask yourself:
What do I really want to focus on in the next 6 months?
If you’re having trouble sharpening your focus, take a look at your achievements from the past 6 months. Do you notice any patterns? For instance, maybe you want to maintain your fitness goal, but you’re not sure how to sustain your enthusiasm for the next half of the year. This is when the lessons learned can be super helpful. Maybe you identified a pattern that you tend to stick to your fitness goal if you go running after work. So, to ensure your success, define your mid-year goal to be: “Go running after work twice a week.”
Why do I want to focus on these goals for the next 6 months?
Try to define the benefits for pursuing these goals. Maybe you’ll feel emotionally fulfilled or maybe you’ve always had a lifelong passion for this goal and you’re excited to finally see it come to fruition. Whatever it is, it’s always much more exciting to pursue a goal when we know why we’re doing it.
What do I need to do?
Now that you have your goals, it’s time to write down a plan of action. This is when we break down our big goal into monthly, weekly, and daily action steps.
Make a list of the small, specific, and realistic steps you can take to move closer to your goal.
If your goal is to meal prep, then specific action steps can include:
- Bookmark recipes
- Create a weekly menu
- Schedule a time to meal prep
- Buy groceries
- Buy tupperware
- Chop veggies
