Reassessing Your Goals

It’s July 2^nd, 2017. I should have written this article yesterday, but I have a schedule to keep, and Saturday’s are reserved for niche site chatter.

Why yesterday?

Because yesterday was the halfway point through the year.

People get all aquiver about New Year’s Resolutions and that all important January 1^st date. Yet very few people set goals on New Year’s Eve and then stick to them.

A year is a long time.

That’s why I always take stock on July 1^st. It’s halfway through, and a chance to remember, reset, forget or optimise your goals from January 1^st.

I think it’s a good idea to take stock of where you are, where you want to be and where you thought you’d be at the beginning of the year. Here are some ideas to help you with this process.

Old Goals

Let’s be honest, a lot of you won’t have written any of your goals down. That’s a mistake that you can rectify right now.

You should write your goals down because when you do, you’ll find not only do you not achieve some of them, but after a few months, you won’t even remember having set some of the goals you set. Now, at this point, your first point of action should be spring cleaning.

Some goals you’ll have forgotten or let drop off because you simply don’t care. There’s nothing wrong with that, but be honest with yourself; if you’re six months in and you’ve made no progress whatsoever, then you’re probably not going to in another six months’ time either. Drop the goals and don’t let the phantom of “I could’ve done this” take energy away from other stuff.

Some things you will still want to achieve. For those, read the “Reassessing The Situation” section below.

New Hobbies

A lot of times, interesting stuff doesn’t pop up in the last week of December. Over the course of a year, things are going to jump out at you and interest you. If you’re holding off on any of those, then July is a perfect time to start – especially for outdoors hobbies.

The reason? It’s summer (in the northern hemisphere at least) which means it’ll be easier to get out and about. Why everyone tries to start jogging in the bleakest part of the year I’ll never know.

July is good for other hobbies because by the time everyone has lined up their new year’s resolutions, you’ll be six months in.

New hobbies are fantastic and if you’re suffering from stagnation in your life, they are the easiest way to fix that feeling.

Reassessing The Situation

There’ll be three camps when you reassess your goals:

1. You’re exceeding yourself. Congratulations.
2. You’re progressing at the rate you’d expect and are putting the hours in
3. You’ve slipped up or are otherwise proceeding slower than expected

Now, separating your goals into the above will probably make it really easy to find out what you need to do to move on up in the world. But let’s assume if you’re exceeding expectations, you’ll want to do one of two things;

1. Keep going
2. Scale back your time commitment in favour of other things

For the second option, it’s pretty much the same but you might want to spend more time on getting better quicker, depending on your ultimate goal and the importance of the goal.

For the third option, here’s where something is wrong:

1. Are you doing something wrong?
2. Have you not put enough hours in?
3. Is the challenge harder or longer in duration than you were expecting?

It’ll depend on your goals, but you’ll likely fall into those three camps. Once you know what you’re dealing with, you can move towards the solution.

Final Thoughts: In Six Months’ Time…

I’m going to wrap this article up short because it’s better you get on with assessing your goals than reading more of my words.

The overall point of goals and resolutions is to progress. You don’t have to limit this to January 1^st but New Year is a good starting point because you’ve got an objective and easily remembered starting point.

Other starting points of merit can be your Birthday, other festivals and holidays or the start of any month.

July 1^st is a great time to start because you’ll have six months before the New Year comes and you can feed into the whole goal-setting mindset that takes over everyone at that time of year.

As another important side note, it’s always valuable to take time out to reassess and work out where you’re going as far as your goals are concerned.

So do that now.