Revising Goals Mid-Year to Finish the Year Strong

Stories, Life Lessons & Tips

Why Revising our Goals Matters

A Story

A few years ago, during the pandemic, I launched a group program for working moms, which has evolved into a program for working women.

It was a time when all of us felt overwhelmed. We were working full time and our kids were at home full time. The world felt defined by uncertainty, and constant anxiety and busyness seemed to permeate life. In addition, we were all isolated, which I’ve decided is one of the most painful aspects of being human.

 

The group program was (and still is!) centered around setting goals across four key areas of life, to live life in alignment with your values and move forward intentionally across the board. So often when we think of goals work comes to mind immediately, quickly followed by health goals typically related to eating better, exercising more, and losing weight.

 

However, our relationships are one of the most important aspects of our lives, and so closely aligned with our happiness. This includes both our relationship with ourselves, and our relationships with others.

 

So I have my clients set goals in four areas of their lives each January: Career, Personal, Key Relationships, and Care work, which can include parenting or caring for aging parents.

I also started setting my own annual goals in this way several years ago, and it led to some important transformations in my life. Most notably:

 

• Setting goals in my business each year has helped me create a more realistic sense of time. Sometimes a goal I thought would take a year to achieve has actually taken me 2-3 years. This realization is one I have been building on, reminding myself that things often take 2-3x as long as I think they should in my optimistic initial estimate.

• I now talk to my closest friends twice a month. To me, the two hardest parts of achieving a goal are A) starting, and B) actually making the time. I have “phone dates” scheduled at regular times in my calendar, and I feel more connected to my closest friends than I have in years.

• I know that my goal is to spend 15 minutes of quality time each day with each of my kids. There are many days when I don’t achieve this goal. But having it clearly articulated helps me know where I want to be, and it reminds me to put down my computer and my phone in the evening when my night-owl daughter wants to talk and I am dead tired.

 

Being intentional, and knowing what we want does not mean we’ll achieve success all the time, but it does act as a north star to lead us in a direction that we want to be going in.

The Life Lesson

We can’t identify and write our goals down in January and never look at them again. Goals need to be written down initially, revised, and they need to be living, breathing documents that we look at regularly.

 

Some of the goals we set at the beginning of the year we’ll achieve, some we’ll scrap, and for others we need to change the timeline around because new important things have come up.

Summer is a wonderful mid-year change of pace, filled with ice-cream and swimming and camp and vacations.

September is a time to start again. The crispness in the air, and the kids back in school is the perfect time to get the January goals out, see what still fits, and get clear on what you’d like to achieve by the end of the year to feel like, “Hey 2024, you may have been filled with ups and downs, but you brought me some key wins that I feel grateful for.”

A Tip

Dig out your goals from January and revise them by Sept 15.

If you did not set goals in January, no worries, set them now. Think about how you want to feel on December 31, 2024, and backwards plan what you need to do between now and then. Your future self will thank you!

 

(And here’s a bonus for parents navigating the back-to-school season – a one-pager I created for each of my kids to get clear on their responsibilities, internalize them, and to learn how to manage their time. Edit and adapt for your child!)