Is 2019 unfolding just as you’d hoped? Are you on track to achieve your goals?
If you’ve been following along with the Coaching by SMK blog, you will remember that in January I pointed out the importance of setting up your own plan for how you want to live your life. Now that we’re half-way through the year it’s time to check in.
Today’s post is all about how to revisit your goals, to celebrate your wins so far and to get back on track if you’ve fallen off the wagon in your mid-year achievement check.
Look at Your Plan Anew
Pull out the most recent version of your plan. You may have been updating it through the year as you made progress, for many of us though, our plans have started to gather dust since January, if this is the case it’s even more important to have another look at it now.
The first thing you will want to look at, when carrying out your mid-year achievement check, is whether your plan still makes sense for you. Sometimes when we make plans, life, business direction and our priorities can change. That’s completely normal. If it still fits your goals, then you can continue to work with it.
However, if when you revisit it you realise that it doesn’t fit with where you are now. Take the opportunity to consider what has changed since you drew up this plan.
Perhaps your life or work circumstances have changed, maybe your priorities have shifted, or your passion has made itself felt in another area and you no longer feel called to pursue the goals you set for yourself. Whatever the reason for this change, when you explore it you can learn from it.
Appraise Your Performance
Time to see if you did what you said you were going to do. When you look at what you wanted to achieve this year, now that we’re half-way through, are you happy with your progress to date? You may like to allocate yourself a score for your performance so far. This creates a benchmark with which to challenge yourself in future.
Don’t be too hard on yourself here. If you didn’t achieve what you set out to, there may be valid reasons for this. If you’re not happy with your progress, ask yourself why you’re not happy. Did you do your best?
You may find that you didn’t achieve all that you wanted to, but you have experienced a period of illness which stopped you from doing all you hoped to. If you still made forward progress, that’s excellent news. You cannot expect yourself to perform at your peak all the time.
Make allowances for where life intruded on your plans. It tends to do that and so any plan that doesn’t allow for unexpected developments is unrealistic. Life is not always plain sailing and you are human so don’t berate yourself if your performance is not quite what you had hoped it would be.
Celebrate Your Wins
If you are on track and have done, more or less, what you set out to achieve by your mid-year achievement check, that’s fantastic! Well done – now it’s time to celebrate!
Celebrating our successes isn’t just to make ourselves feel good. When we challenge ourselves and receive a reward for achievement, we are more likely to strive to achieve our goals in future. However, if we don’t allow ourselves a reward, subconsciously, we may begin to think ‘what’s the point?’ Challenge without reward wears us down and causes us to give up.
Move Forward with Confidence
Once you’ve celebrated your achievement, the next step is to set the next goal on your agenda. Ask yourself what’s next and then lay out a path to achieve this goal. The confidence you have gained from realising your goals in the first 6 months of the year will give you a boost and help you to feel that the next challenge is as attainable.
If you haven’t quite reached the objectives you had hoped to by your mid-year achievement check, that’s fine. The most important thing is to allow yourself some time to take stock.
- What caused you to go off track?
- Was it one thing or was there a combination of factors at play?
- Was your goal too ambitious?
- Did something unexpected arise which caused the lack of progress?
Whatever the reason for going off track, acknowledge it so that you can learn from it. When we see how we got distracted, disheartened or even burnt out in the past then we can plan ways to prevent it in future.
It can be a good idea to do this exercise with a trusted friend or colleague if you don’t have a manager who carries out a review with you. Of course, you can do it by yourself, but we can tend to be harder on ourselves in areas over which we have no control.
There is a fine line between giving yourself a hard time and being fair about how much you have achieved. If this is something that you struggle with, working with a professional coach can give you the perspective you need. As a qualified professional, and an outsider, a coach can look at your situation objectively and will support and challenge you where necessary. Beating yourself up is no fun and it doesn’t motivate you to do better. However, letting yourself off the hook completely could mean that you never achieve all that you hope to.
If you’d like to have a no-obligation free discovery call with me, Sinead, from Coaching by SMK, you can book your call on my website. We will have a chat, see if we’re a good match and how we might be able to work together to ensure you continue to make forward progress with your goals.
